


Thirteen Weeks

by red_river



Series: Second Chances [2]
Category: K (Anime)
Genre: AU, Angst, Gen, M/M, Reishi and Shiro Friendship, Romance, Series Fix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 12:50:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8162593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/red_river/pseuds/red_river
Summary: Four weeks after the events of Return of Kings, Reishi gets a phone call that changes everything."There's a chance Suoh Mikoto may still be alive."Series fix, Reishi/Mikoto main.  Told in a series of vignettes.





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> This project has been a long time in the offing. It's a series fix to bring Mikoto back to life after "Return of Kings," and meant to be a stepping stone to future stories. For that reason, I apologize, there's not too much of Mikoto himself in this story, though there's a lot of Reishi thinking about him. Much of the story is an introduction to Reishi's new life and his new friendship with Shiro/Weismann. 
> 
> That said, I really enjoy these two, and I hope to be doing more writing into this AU in the future. Thanks for reading.
> 
> P.S. I've changed a number of things about characters ages, when their swords manifested, etc. to suit the story. Sorry if that throws anyone.

**Prologue**

 

After three days of unrelenting rain, the sun had found them again.  It seemed as good an excuse as any to leave the patio doors open.  From where he sat just inside the shadows of the drawing room, spinning a key ring absently around one finger, the former Silver King looked out on a view of the harbor, kites and colorful sailboats like splashes of oil paint on the canvas of the sea.  The wind was at work in the long white curtains, heady with the scent of sea salt and citrus from the lemon trees that lined the sloping street, rows of quaint houses rambling down to the shore.  The man who had recently decided he preferred the name Shiro Weismann smiled to himself as he closed his eyes, leaning back in his wicker chair.

“You have a nice view from here.  Not that you’ve been appreciating it so far.”

The other figure in the room remained silent, which hardly came as a surprise.  He’d been very close-lipped since the first time Shiro came to visit him here, almost fourteen months ago.

With a long breath, the Silver King let his eyes flicker open again, rolling forward to brace his chin on his hand.  “I don’t come here out of guilt, you know,” he told the motionless form of Suoh Mikoto, encased in a glass casket that comprised the room’s centerpiece.  Translucent screens above the pod charted his most vital measurements in soft waves—heartbeat, breath, brainwave patterns.  Numbers that hadn’t changed in more than a year.

Shiro shook his head.  In the time before his rebirth—well, his first rebirth—his association with the wild and irrepressible Red King had been so fleeting; it was strange to think he’d known him longer like this, ashen and voiceless, hovering between life and whatever came after it.

“Ours is a complicated balance sheet,” the Silver King continued lightly, wagging his finger in a way that made the keys jingle.  “If we went back far enough, I have a feeling you started it.  But in the broad strokes, it’s messy—you killed me and that killed you, so I guess we’ll call it even.” His smile turned fond.  “We both owe the Lieutenant a great deal, though.  This place…well, I think he intended it for me, in case the power of the Slates hadn’t been enough to revive me completely.  But he was a good man, Mikoto…not the kind to leave someone to die, if there was any chance of saving them.”

Perhaps nothing had been as astonishing as finding himself alive and whole once more after feeling the full fury of the Red Aura tear through the body that had been his and the Colorless King’s, one and then the other and finally both at the same time.  To find that the Silver power of eternity extended to the reintegration of molecules was a very welcome surprise.  But he had been almost as surprised to come back to himself on the Gold King’s airship and find that he and Kokujoji were not alone, the battered body of the former Red King slowly healing in deep stasis.

Since the Lieutenant’s death, there had been too many pressing worries to deal with the sleeping King; Shiro had wondered a few times, in the bleak moments, if there would be anyone left to deal with Suoh Mikoto at all, once the dust settled.  But with the Slates and the Swords gone for good, it was time to turn attention to this figure still sleeping under a veil of glass—his attention, and someone else’s.

The phone on the small white table chimed once, a text alert.  Shiro picked it up and flicked his hand to reveal the message.

_Off the train.  Five minutes. —MR_

Shiro smiled, typing out the house’s address at a painfully slow speed—he was still all thumbs with these things.  Then he set it down and rose from his chair, considering the wings of the sailboats on the water as the curtains swirled around him.

“Given everything that happened between us, I guess it’s not surprising that I haven’t been worth waking up for.  You have a new visitor coming today, though. I have a feeling he’s going to be a live-in.  Maybe he can get through to you in a way that I haven’t.”

No reaction, as usual.  Shiro sighed, his expression slipping as he ran a hand through his hair.

“I lied to him, you know,” he went on, his voice barely a ripple in the still air.  “I want you to wake up, so I told him a whole bushel of lies.  I told him that I only just found out about you. I told him you should be waking up any time now. I told him he’s the only one who can bring you back.  If you’d like to contradict any of those statements, feel free to do it yourself.”

He turned to study the Red King over his shoulder, the watery reflection of his own image in the glass.

“Your injuries are long healed.  You should have been awake a long time ago, if it was going to happen.  But I’ve always believed in beating the odds.  Besides,” he added, finding his smile again as he stepped close enough to rest a soft hand against the frontpiece of the glass coffin, over the figure sleeping inside with skin as white as snow. “This is a very old story.  A classic.  Not even you would have the heart to mess up this one, right?  Mikoto.”

He lingered there for another moment, studying the very reserved man whose company he’d been keeping. From the stories, the Red King wasn’t nearly this composed when he was conscious; he hoped to get the chance to discover that in person.  A noise outside caught in his ears, and he turned away to face the open doors and the rumble of a car motor making its way up the street, a taxi with its light out pausing at the end of the drive. 

Shiro folded the keys into the cradle of his palm and stepped onto the patio, just in time to watch the passenger door swing open and Munakata Reishi step out onto the sidewalk, blinking against the sun.  The Silver King smiled to himself.

“Though technically, it’s supposed to be a white horse, not a taxi,” he said, too softly for even Mikoto to hear him.  Then he crossed to the railing and lifted a hand in greeting, ready to play his part in this tale.


	2. First Week

Reishi stepped out of a taxi and paused with one hand on the door’s crossbar, shielding his eyes from the glare of the early spring sun.  The three-hour train ride along the coast had transformed what began that morning as a passing headache into an unrelenting pounding inside his skull, aggravated by everything from the vibration of the car to the sharp smell of the battered lemons lying in the gutter at his feet, washed down by the previous night’s rain.  The stark shafts of sunlight were needles in his sensitive, sleepless eyes.

He had intended to rest on the train, to soothe at least a little the throb under his temples, but in the end he hadn’t been able to close his eyes—had passed the time just staring out the window, cataloguing fractured glimpses of side streets in small towns and the intimation of the bright sea somewhere beyond the rolling skyline.  By the time he looked back, Shizume City had softened into a gray haze, indistinguishable from the early morning fog.  Three hours slipped away from him like that, his mind stalled, replaying every detail of the phone call from the night before.

It wasn’t unusual for the evening to find him still seated at the desk in his office, flipping through reports long after Scepter 4 had fallen silent around him.  What was unusual was for the tedium of deciphering fact from hyperbole in Fushimi’s mission reports to be interrupted by a call coming in on his private cell phone—a number he didn’t recognize, followed by an equally indistinguishable voice, his first name crackling across the line.

_“Reishi.”_

Reishi had straightened at his desk, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose.  _“To whom am I speaking?”_ he asked neutrally, already readying the call trace program.  He hesitated as the voice gave a startled laugh.

_“Ah—sorry.  Silver King here.  New body—well, old body, if you want to split hairs.  In any case, the vocal chords are a bit different.”_

Reishi dismissed the tracker program, stared across the room at the set of blue-lacquered daisho swords on top of his bookcase.  _“A great many people have been looking for you,”_ he replied at last—something of an understatement for the pandemonium that broke out among the Silver clansmen when their monarch had disappeared, again, after the destruction of the Slates.  Reishi himself had wondered whether they’d lost the Silver King permanently this time.

Another laugh in his ear, this one softer, self-effacing. _“Don’t worry.  I’ve already been in touch with Kuroh and Miyabi.  I’ll be headed back to Shizume City soon, but there’s a very urgent matter I need to discuss with you first.”_ A long exhale, rippling like static along the line. _“There’s a chance Suoh Mikoto may still be alive.”_

Effortlessly, Reishi could remember the feeling of the blood stilling in his veins, the ache of a held breath that stalled between his ribs, piercing him like a blade.  _“What?”_ he asked, too softly to be heard—but it didn’t matter, the Silver King was already speaking again, his words indistinct now as if through the roar of a tremendous storm.  Reishi couldn’t tell if it was raining on the other side of the line or if that was his blood, a tempest in his ears.

 _“Well, no—that’s not quite right.  I suppose it’s more like, there’s a chance he could be alive again.”_ A rustle of movement, as if the Silver King had shifted the phone to his other hand.  _“There’s a train leaving Shizume City early tomorrow, at 6:15.  Any chance you can make that?”_

He had been able to concentrate on very little of the explanation that followed, and the technological mastery of the Gold King had always been somewhat over his head.  But what he did understand was enough to keep him up the rest of the night, packing what he had on hand into a small black duffle bag and then standing for two hours on a train platform, watching the dawn break over the black sea.

For the first time in thirteen months, the sun rose on a world in which Suoh Mikoto was alive.  Or, potentially alive.  In any case, no longer just a ghost in Reishi’s periphery, a glimmer of scarlet caught in the corner of his eye, only to vanish as soon as he turned his head.

As he paid the taxi driver and retrieved his bag, Reishi turned to regard the small house over his shoulder.  From the outside, it was identical to any other on the street, an anonymous façade of forgettable architecture painted in pastel red—augmented at this moment by the figure standing on the wide patio, his long coat billowing around his knees as he leaned into the railing.

Reishi had known the Silver King only long enough in his borrowed form that it was strange to see him this way, wearing a face he remembered from gray-and-white pictures in history books, the grainy photographs that detailed the first discovery of the Slates.  Unlike the boy they’d come to know as Isana Yashiro, Adolph Weismann appeared to be a few years older than Reishi, in his early thirties perhaps, and nearly his height.  He wore an effortless smile, waving with one hand and dangling a set of keys in the other—remarkably at ease for someone who had not only reincarnated twice but had proposed a similar miracle for someone else.

“Good morning, Reishi.  Thanks for coming on such short notice.”

Though they didn’t know each other well, it didn’t surprise him that the man had chosen his first name.  Since he’d come into his Kingship, the people who had called him by that name had almost universally held a great deal of power over him: the Gold King, the Silver King…and of course, the Red Kings.

“Silver King,” Reishi greeted, as calmly as he could.

The man waved the formality away. His laugh disappeared into the purr of the taxi departing from the curb.  “Shiro, please.  Shiro Weismann.” And then, apparently catching his raised eyebrow: “Adolph is impossibly stuffy.  A new name for a new era.”

“It suits you,” Reishi replied automatically.  But even to himself, he couldn’t pretend his voice was more than barely holding steady, the mindless pleasantries thick as dust in his mouth.  He took a deep breath and felt his ribs tighten around it.  “Where is he?”

Weismann’s smile went soft at the corners.  He cocked his head toward the stairs that led up to the porch.  “Follow me.”

What surprised him first was the vastness of the space.  From the sunlit patio he followed the Silver King into an all but empty room, an expanse of polished wood floors and lofted ceilings, as if the entire core of the house had been hollowed out.  To his left was the anachronism of a white wicker table and two matching chairs, patio furniture someone had dragged inside; along the far wall, the vague sheen of computer servers studded with flickering lights.  All Reishi could really see was the glass chamber in the center of the room.  It reminded him of the stasis pods he’d seen in the burn wings of hospitals, and yet somehow even more advanced, augmented by a flutter of floating screens telling him that the figure inside was alive, at least by one definition.

Reishi wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting.  Perhaps there was no way to expect any of this, no well-reasoned reaction to the body of the Red King sheathed in iridescent glass, naked but for the clinical sheet pulled up to his shoulders and the glinting silver ring pierced through the shell of his ear.  Between the white sheet and the red of his hair, Mikoto looked far too pale, a living sepulcher in a coffin of glass.  Still as death.  Reishi had to set his bag down so he could remove his glasses, rub the bridge of his nose with shaking fingers. 

“Damn it, Mikoto,” he whispered, the words muffled against the hollow of his palm.

What he felt was numb, standing next to Mikoto in this strangely interstitial place—a laboratory inside of a safehouse, a city on the edge of the sea.  What he felt was that this all seemed even more impossible than it had the night before.

What he felt was the Silver King’s hand settling onto his shoulder, warm through the thin fabric of his navy coat.

“Well, I’ve done what I can.  The rest is up to you.”

“What?” Reishi fumbled trying to slip his glasses on and smudged the lenses with his thumbs, stared back at Weismann through the haze of his fingerprints.  “You can’t be talking about leaving—already.  I don’t even understand why you’ve called me here.  You said I could help him, but…what am I supposed to do?”

There was a desperation to the question that he couldn’t rein in, a rawness to his voice unfitting of a King.  But he wasn’t a King anymore.  There were no Kings in this room.

Weismann’s lips quirked up.  “Well, the system’s entirely automated—diagnostics, dedicated backup generator, everything.  Supposedly accident-proof…though I wouldn’t test that too diligently.  Kuroh said the same thing about the stove, and it nearly took off my sleeve.  Which I suppose just leaves the human element.” His fingers tightened around Reishi’s shoulder, shaking him softly.  “Talk to him.”

“Talk…” Reishi trailed off, his dark eyes drawn again to the motionless figure at his feet.  “Can he even hear me?” he asked—not the most important question, but the only one he could put into words.

Weismann shrugged.  “According to the specifications, the device is wired for sound.  If you’re asking a more philosophical question, I don’t have an answer to that.  And from what I hear, whether he’d listen is also up for debate.” Those light hazel eyes were almost unbearably gentle.  “There’s nothing keeping him asleep any longer.  He just hasn’t found the will to wake up yet.”

Reishi shifted his feet, feeling the forgotten ache flare behind his temples again.  He wanted to say that Mikoto had never been that kind of man—the kind who relied on anyone else’s will to push him forward—but he stopped short, uncertain, on second thought, what they’d understood about each other by the end.  He opened his mouth and then let it fall closed.

“What do you expect me to say?” he managed at last.  “That I still remember the first time we met—that we despised each other on sight, and only the presence of the Gold King prevented the encounter from ending in a brawl right there in Mihashira Tower?”

The man beside him made a face, somewhere between a smile and a grimace.  “Well, that’s one approach—if you really think picking a fight is the right way to go.  Personally, I was hoping you had some fonder memories…”

Reishi didn’t know how to answer that.  So much had broken between them, in the last months before…he wasn’t even sure which Mikoto he was trying to reach, which one had been so flawlessly preserved.  He removed his glasses again and wiped the lenses slowly clear with a soft cloth from his breast pocket.  When he’d finished, he found the Silver King had turned away, an absent smile touching his lips as he looked out at the cerulean curl of the town’s small harbor, the white boats waiting like cranes for a favorable wind.

“You know, Reishi…if I thought the memory of a black eye was going to be enough, I could have called anyone.” There was a playfulness to the reprimand, and yet Reishi felt the weight of it all the same, the frisson of something unspoken passing between them.  He turned to face the open doors as well.

“Why did you call me?”

Weismann chuckled.  “ _I_ didn’t.  He did.  He’s been waiting for you.”

The air in Reishi’s lungs was like ash, blackening him from the inside.  “You can’t know that,” he said.

The Silver King tipped his head to one side, giving Reishi a look.  “Can’t I?” he returned.  “Haven’t you been waiting for him?”

Reishi didn’t say anything, his eyes straying, inevitably, back to Mikoto, the one thread he had never been able to cut—the person for whom, even after death, he had left everything behind.  Turned this way, all he could decipher was the rush of that brilliant red hair, a wildfire raging against the glass.  He cleared his throat, staring out at the water with unseeing eyes.

“I’ve arranged for someone to take charge of Scepter 4. The squads themselves should be in order, but there are other things that need to be taken care of—Jungle, the Gold Clan, the remaining Strains.” Reishi brushed his thumb absently against his belt, the void where his sword should have been.  “I can’t—I don’t want to leave him here, but…”

“It sounds like you could use an extra pair of hands,” the Silver King teased.  Then he extended one of his for a handshake, and when Reishi drew back there was something hard and cold resting in his palm, an old-fashioned house key tattooing the grooves of metal teeth into his skin.  Weismann gave his shoulder a long squeeze.  “He’s in there, Reishi,” he murmured, so softly the words got lost in the whisper of the swaying curtains.  “Give him a reason to wake up.”

“Thank you,” Reishi managed before the other man set off down the stairs—though for what, it would take him longer to decide.

He stood in the doorway until Weismann had vanished from the street below, the echo of his footsteps trailing down the hill the only suggestion that Reishi hadn’t always been here, alone with his eternal ghost.  Then he took one of the wicker chairs by the top rail and pulled it deeper into the room, close enough to study the Red King’s repose as he sat down with his back to the sea, tracing the calluses of swordsmanship with the pad of his thumb.

“It’s been a long time, Mikoto.”

It was an hour before he said anything else.

 

* * *

 

 

For the first week, Reishi couldn’t find it in himself to leave the house.  He spent most of his time sitting in silent vigil over the Red King, fighting to break the pall of silence that had fallen over them like a shroud.  He confined his explorations to the building, piecing together a vision of the sloping yard thick with ripening lemon trees from glances stolen out the wide, sundrenched windows.  The alcove tucked away at the back of the house put him in mind of the Scepter 4 break room—a small refrigerator, a microwave, and a cot on stiff metal legs.

He spent fifteen tenuous minutes deciphering how to switch the stasis chamber into a quieter mode, so that the silver-gray monitors only flickered to life above the pod if something changed; he hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away from them, his ribs aching in the breathless milliseconds between each charted heartbeat.  At dusk, he dragged the thin mattress off the cot in the break room and set it up to Mikoto’s left, and felt more at home than he’d expected stretched out on his back on the hard floor, the absence of his carefully folded glasses reducing the figure beside him to a soft white and scarlet blur.  It reminded him of the duty barracks at Scepter 4, where he’d stayed almost exclusively since he lost Mikoto and his apartment in the city became a cemetery, haunted by the sense memory of the impact in the nerves of his hand, the weight of the Red King’s body sagging into him as his last breath burned into Reishi’s skin.  It had been easier to sleep at Headquarters, where the rattle of time-worn springs and the sound of his clansmen tossing and turning in the gray dark kept his ghosts at bay. 

In the time between, he talked to Mikoto.

On nights when he couldn’t sleep, he stood on the patio and watched the ocean churning against the coast, the pallor of white foam seething in and out just beyond the boundary of the city lights.  That was as far as he’d ventured by the seventh day, when Shiro Weismann reappeared.

Since his arrival, Reishi had lost track of the Silver King, though his clansman, Yatogami Kuroh, had come by the house a few times, delivering boxed meals and casting a sideways glance at the line of  long-sleeved shirts left drying over the porch railing after a rinse in the sink.  He couldn’t be sure whether the man stepping in off the patio had been in town all week or had already made one trip back to Shizume City; it seemed like he’d been somewhere, though, if the beckoning cat figurine under his arm was any indication.

“What is that?” Reishi asked, watching in puzzlement as the Silver King stooped to set the half-foot, brightly painted porcelain statue under the window.  Weismann straightened with a smile.

“A souvenir—for you and Mikoto.” He swept his hands out to the side, encompassing Reishi and the room and the world beyond the windows all in one.  “This weekend Kuroh took me to see the mountain where he trained, when he was a disciple of the former Colorless King.  It’s a very desolate place, though, so in the interest of full disclosure, I bought this at the train station.”

“The train station…here?” Reishi asked, crooking one eyebrow at the cat, which was still waving good-humoredly at Mikoto.  “It’s a souvenir from this town?” But though the question was wry, he couldn’t deny the slight tug at the corner of his mouth, something in his chest easing at the breach of seven days of stunted, one-sided conversation.  Shiro Weismann was odd and certainly a little out of his time, but his company was not unwelcome.

Weismann laughed.  “Well, it’s not likely you’d have caught me at it.  Kuroh tells me you haven’t done much exploring as yet.” He tipped his chin, giving the former Blue King an appraising look.  “I don’t think I’ve seen you out of uniform before.  It’s a good look for you.”

Reishi glanced down at himself, unimpressed by his attire—a pale gray button-down and black slacks that had escaped the sink, the last of the clean clothes he had brought with him from Shizume City.  He felt a warm hand settle on his elbow.

“Let’s go into town for the afternoon,” Weismann suggested.  “It’s not a big town—you can see nearly all of it in an hour.  But I meant to show you where the grocery store is, and the library.  We can eat at the little place Kuroh likes because they make _chawanmushi_ the traditional way, whatever that means.  Get out of the house for a while,” he finished—and though his expression was serene, Reishi detected a different undercurrent to those final words, a betrayal of the concern that had brought him over.

Reishi’s breath faltered on the inhale.  “I…I don’t know,” he replied after a moment, his eyes drawn, always, back to Mikoto, still frozen in a single frame.  “I don’t know if I’m doing any good here, but…I don’t feel like I can leave him.”

Weismann hummed under his breath, turning to regard the Red King for the first time.  “Have you been talking to him?” he asked softly.

Reishi carded a hand through his hair.  “I’ve been trying.”

Even after he found his tongue, it was difficult to know where to start.  In the absence of inspiration, he had worked his way forward chronologically, disconcerted to realize how much the beginning of their story mirrored the end—two clans in constant conflict, the heat and adrenaline of another aura crashing into his in a time when the Red and Blue Kings had traded blows like words, unable to communicate in any other language.  It reminded him of things he didn’t want to remember: how the cold of that last night when they met in the snow had seeped into his bones, left him brittle on the inside.  How he’d watched Mikoto’s back for an eternity as he trudged down the icy temple stairs, already just a shadow, a phantom in the fading light.

He lowered his head, contemplating his hands and the tense entwining of his fingers.  “We were very different Kings,” he said finally, dropping back into the familiar wicker chair.  “I’m realizing most of our early memories weren’t the kind you relive.”

The Silver King hesitated.  At last he moved to the second chair, pulling it forward until they could sit side by side, Mikoto laid out immaculately before them.

“How old were you when your Sword manifested?” he asked.

“Nineteen,” Reishi replied.  Weismann’s expression softened.

“Young,” he murmured, and something about his tone made Reishi wonder how much younger it must seem to Weismann than it even did to him, at twenty-eight.

“Mikoto was chosen first, by a few months,” he said.  It was easier to think about it this way, in ages, calendar dates, the numerical rather than the emotional quotient.  “Our Rights of Kingship must have manifested very closely together, because the Gold King summoned us at the same time.  As I recall, he had to drag Mikoto into Mihashira Tower by the scruff of his neck.” Reishi shook his head.  “He didn’t…he doesn’t like to belong to things beyond his control.”

He had to pause there, blinded by the memory of Mikoto ten years younger, hunched into the bulk of a heavy black coat and already wearing that wounded look in his brooding amber eyes, as if hunted by his Kingship when it had barely begun.  Unconsciously, he reached out and rested the flat of his palm against the glass, as if trying to soothe the turmoil from a much younger face.

He had all but forgotten Weismann until the other man spoke.  “You, on the other hand, strike me as someone who takes his duties very seriously,” he said, the declaration light with a playful lilt.

Reishi turned to the Silver King with half a smile caught in the corner of his mouth.  “A strange insight, coming from the man who’s recently had to assume them for me.” He breathed out softly.  “Those first few years, we only seemed to be in each other’s way.  I thought he was stubborn, barbaric, out of control…he thought I was an arrogant prick who got off on keeping a bunch of fawning bootlickers around to stroke my ego.”

“Now that sounds like a direct quote,” Weismann teased.

Reishi returned his smile.  “An insight he saw fit to share, once we got to know each other better.”

The feeling of those early clashes lingered like an aftertaste on his tongue—the char of the Red aura sweeping over him; the exhilaration of testing himself against an opponent on his level; the rush of the blood in his ears as he picked himself up out of splintered glass, the first time Mikoto had knocked him through a window.  He had always returned such things in kind.

In the intervening years, Reishi had remembered those early wars with a kind of exasperated fondness, for Mikoto and for himself.  Now he couldn’t help looking at them in a darker light, wondering if everything that happened between them had been inevitable even then.

Weismann let the silence rest between them for a while.  When a few minutes passed that way, he leaned over and placed a hand on Reishi’s forearm, drawing pensive blue eyes back to his.

“Well,” he began, “I’m afraid we’re in a bit of a bind.  It’s almost noon, and you’re probably at least as hungry as I am.  Unfortunately, Kuroh refuses to deliver your lunch anymore, since you’ve been using the safety shower and it doesn’t have a curtain.  I wouldn’t have minded, personally, but…” The Silver King shrugged, and Reishi blinked, a little bemused by his visitor—surprisingly straightforward for a man from seventy years ago.  Weismann cocked his head toward the door.  “I have a feeling you didn’t look at those papers Kuroh brought over before you signed them—but in any case, that was a short-term lease for an apartment in town, just five minutes’ walk from here.”

“An apartment?” Reishi echoed.

“Oh, don’t give me that look—I don’t expect you to sleep there.” Weismann smiled at the cot laid out beside Mikoto’s chamber.  “But it is fully furnished, with a shower curtain and everything.  Washer and dryer in unit!” he added, announcing the last with a joviality that made Reishi think the Silver clansman had been complaining about more than where he took his showers.  “Let me walk you over there, and then we can get something to eat.  This is a tourist town in the summer, you know—plenty of restaurants down on the boardwalk.  What sounds good?”

Reishi was silent for a long time.  But whether the Silver King was saying it or not, the implication was clear—he couldn’t stay here interminably, unmoving, for as long as it took Mikoto to awake, just as frozen in his own way as the figure encased in glass.  Eventually he straightened in his chair.

“Ramen,” he murmured.  “Is there a ramen shop in town?”

“Ramen?” the Silver King repeated, curious.  “I think there’s a shop down by the quay…they specialize in a dish with squid ink and scallops.  It’s a harbor town, after all.”

There was a small smile tugging at the corners of Reishi’s lips, his shoulders relaxing as the ache of examining old scars gave way to something sweeter, a memory he hadn’t come back to in a while: the rainy night when he’d slipped under the curtain of a streetside noodle stall and found himself eating ramen on a stool beside Suoh Mikoto, staring back into wide amber eyes.  More than the formalities, the opening salvo of verbal sparring, what he remembered was the way Mikoto’s shoulders had softened with time; the little smile caught in the upturned corner of his mouth next to a smudge of curry sauce.

“If you don’t mind,” he said to Weismann, and let the rest hang—the request and the gratitude, and the recollection of the way Mikoto had ducked his head to hide a smile as Reishi took his leave, the low murmur of _See you around_ that had drawn him back again and again. 


	3. Memory

Reishi had been a King for three years and four months the first time he ducked his head under the curtain of a streetside noodle stall and found himself eating ramen on a stool beside Suoh Mikoto.  What was stranger was that it wouldn’t be the last time.

Taking his place at the forefront of the Blue clan had not come as easily as he’d initially hoped.  In the five years between the Kagutsu Crater incident and his ascension as the Blue King, the once-respected Scepter 4 had withered like an atrophied limb, until it was little more than a group of jaded veterans content with patrolling less than half of their former territory while waiting to collect their city pensions.  They had no use for a young, ambitious King.  Reishi quickly discovered he had less use for them.

Replacing them was the obvious solution, but that was a slow process.  In the meantime, he had compensated for the inefficacy of his clan primarily by doing everything himself, from leading patrols and Strain suppression raids to negotiating with his rival Kings.  He’d had to fight for every inch of territory, but it was working; gradually Scepter 4 was reclaiming the reputation it had held nearly a decade ago as the peacekeeping, public-facing branch of the entire Kingship system, ruthless in the execution of law but always above reproach.  Only two days before, the Gold King had approved Reishi’s petition for another expansion of influence, placing Scepter 4 in charge of eight square miles within the industrial district.

With the exception of his ongoing feud with the untamed, irrepressible Red King, everything was going to plan.  But even getting by on four hours of sleep, there were still only twenty-four hours in a day, and that left almost no time for domestic tasks.  Reishi had gotten used to substituting a cup of coffee from the break room for breakfast, leaving the laundry and the upkeep of his sparse apartment to the slightly faulty home robot that had come with the property, which couldn’t cook anything aside from plain rice and sometimes ironed creases into instead of out of his uniform undershirts.  When he remembered to eat dinner, it was usually out.

Which was how he’d found himself standing across the street from a noodle stall just after midnight, on his way home from a solo patrol of the newly incorporated industrial precinct, and let the soft rain of the late hour chase him inside, drops of water sliding down the flags to splatter against his shoulders as he passed.  He had taken a seat before he realized exactly who it was he was sitting next to—a young man about his age with startling scarlet hair, who turned from his bowl of katsu curry ramen mid-bite to stare at Reishi with wide amber eyes.

“Suoh…” Reishi said before he caught himself.  He barely heard the greeting of the shop’s owner over the pulse of the blood suddenly thick in his ears, the Blue aura coalescing automatically at his fingertips.  Though he was on neutral territory, he had never imagined crossing paths with the Red King outside the bounds of their respective roles—both of them out of uniform, Reishi dressed casually under his long wool coat, Mikoto’s usual profusion of silver jewelry and sharp edges traded out for a plain black T-shirt, the straggle of damp red hair clinging to his neck.  It would have been one thing to find him tucked away in the shadowed corner of a bar or a back alley, somewhere that could still be a battlefield.  But this was an unguarded moment, more intimate, and he felt vulnerable in it, watching the Red King roll his suddenly stiff shoulders.

As usual, Suoh expressed all of that more eloquently than he could.

“Ah, shit.”

Reishi narrowed his eyes, irritated in spite of himself.  “Excuse me?”

The Red King shrugged, a long, languid motion belied by the tight line of his lips.  “Nothing.  Just, ’m gonna miss this place.”

Reishi wasn’t certain if the man was picking a fight with him or just eschewing his company, but it hardly mattered.  He had no intention of returning to this establishment, if it was favored by the feral rabble of street thugs Suoh Mikoto had declared his clan.  He could hear the rain alive on the canvas roof stretched over their stools, a warning that stepping back outside would earn him a very objectionable fifteen-minute walk home.  And the weather aside, excusing himself over Suoh’s mere presence struck him as far too childish, a withdrawal he wasn’t willing to make.  Reishi bit down a sigh, wiping his glasses dry with more patience than he felt.

“Tell me I haven’t stumbled into one of your usual haunts.”

The man he didn’t know yet as Mikoto swirled chopsticks through the murky broth of his ramen, corn kernels and thick-cut scallions spinning on the eddies of golden curry.  “Nothing I go out of my way for,” he replied, though Reishi wondered, the way he was bent forward over the bowl.  “Was just out for a walk.”

“Without your dogs?” Reishi shot back, though he regretted it almost at once; it wasn’t two days yet since the Gold King had taken him to task, again, for the destruction of public property that always seemed to follow when the Red and Blue clans engaged.  “You’re a long way from your territory,” he said after a moment, with more civility.

Suoh just snorted.  “Right back at ya.”

Their stalemate was interrupted by the shop attendant, who reached over the counter to offer Reishi a cup of tea without being asked.  Reishi gave him a cursory glance—a man in his early middle age, gray before his time, his face pinched in a good-natured scowl.  “Hey, Mikoto—don’t go scaring off my customers,” he warned, surprising Reishi with the use of the Red King’s first name.  “I get few enough as it is.”

Suoh—Mikoto—shot him a sour look.  “Like that’s any surprise, you tightfisted bastard.  You always stiff people on the toppings.  Did you put any curry in here at all, or did you just serve me in a dirty bowl?”

It was obviously a familiar exchange, so automatic Mikoto didn’t even consider the words before they were off his tongue.  Then he seemed to remember the Blue King’s presence and hunched over his ramen again, catching Reishi’s gaze through the clash of red bangs the rain had chased into his eyes.

“Would you order already?” he grumbled, not sharply enough to disguise his discomfort.

In truth, Reishi had been stalling, searching for an excuse to rise and take his leave.  He understood intrinsically that things were simpler the way they had been, when the Red King was a nuisance, an adversary, not a person with three dimensions.  Not a young man taking shelter from the rain in a deserted ramen stall and griping about not getting his fair share.  The storm was cacophony at his back, whipping the last of the autumn leaves into a fury along the street.  An even less welcome thought than staying.  Reishi straightened on his stool and cleared his throat, arming himself with the intentional distance implicit in formality.

“I confess I’ve never visited this establishment before.  I’m not sure what to order.”

Mikoto stared at him for a long moment, eyes narrowed against the low light—and though this was the closest they’d ever managed to a conversation, Reishi had the sense the other man could see right through them, the elaborate walls he constructed of nothing but words.  Then the Red King sighed, carving an agitated hand back through his wet hair.

“I dunno.  Katsu’s pretty much the only thing I get. Totsuka likes the shoyu,” he added, catching Reishi’s dubious glance at the calamity of his bowl.  “If you’re not into pork, I’ll eat yours.”

“You’ll eat…my pork?” Reishi repeated, not at all sure how to respond to that.

Mikoto shrugged.  “As a fee for recommending it.  S’only fair.”

Reishi tried to remember which one Totsuka was.  He tried to imagine where fairness entered into this negotiation, if at all.  He wondered if the recommendation was just a ploy to redress the purported unfairness of his portion.  But whatever strange magic had been at work in Mikoto’s eyes a moment before must have infected him as well, because he didn’t have to wonder what this was—an olive branch, however unusual in its specifics.  An invitation to wait out the rain together in the heady warmth of this stolen, surreal moment, not as opposing Kings but just as acquaintances, or even strangers, three years of bad blood washed clean by the storm.  It was an invitation he should refuse.

Reishi wrapped his hand around the teacup, pressed it to his mouth to hide the quirk of a smile.  “Shoyu it is, then.”

A silence, certainly not comfortable but not unbearably strained, settled between them as Reishi waited for his meal and Mikoto returned to his.  Though he pulled his phone from his pocket and kept his chin tipped down, idly reorganizing the excess of old files, Reishi devoted most of his attention to watching Mikoto out of the corner of his eye, curious what he might have understood about him if this were their first meeting.  He was a sloppy eater, Reishi decided immediately, watching him devour his katsu curry ramen all out of order, letting the curry diffuse into the broth and asking for another portion with a string of noodles trailing from his mouth.  His black sneakers were well worn, the rubber sole just beginning to strain at the toes.  A winking silver chain hung between his jeans pockets, making Reishi wonder, as he often did, at the irony implicit in a man who pulled so doggedly at his leash and yet wore so many shackles.

His examination was cut short by the phone vibrating in his hand, announcing an incoming call.  Reishi narrowed his eyes at the name—one of the last of the veteran squad, a man who had questioned the Blue King’s every decision since the moment they were introduced.  A man who wouldn’t have his desk in technical much longer.  He answered the call with a flick of his thumb.

“Yes, Second Sergeant.”

Mikoto glanced over at him, his mouth half-open around his soft-boiled egg.  Reishi looked away as the nasal voice assaulted his ear.

_“Sorry to bother you, sir.  The on-duty squad leader reported you’d gone out patrolling, but I’ve checked the GPS on your phone.  It’s not within our territorial boundaries.”_

“That’s correct,” Reishi said smoothly.  “You may also have noted I’m no longer on the clock, which would suggest my business has become personal.”

The man hesitated, clearly uncertain how to proceed with what had been a feeble excuse to call and harangue him.  “Look, with respect, Captain, as a King you shouldn’t be patrolling at all. It sends the wrong message.  You’re going to get us into it with the other clans if you don’t curb that ambition. I know the territorial lines just changed, but—”

“All the more reason for me to learn my way around,” Reishi replied, disinclined to keep the ice out of his voice.  “I appreciate your concern, but it isn’t warranted.  And unless there’s an emergency, I’ll thank you not to track the GPS on my phone again.” Then he ended the call, slipping the device into a deep pocket where he wouldn’t hear it ring.

“Who was that?” Mikoto asked.  He had finished his egg, but a smear of curry sauce lingered at his lips, his chopsticks clamped around a soggy strip of cutlet dripping broth back into the bowl.  Reishi grimaced, at which exasperation he wasn’t sure.

“Just a subordinate,” he sighed.

Mikoto raised his eyebrows.  “Does he know that?”

“He may need to be reminded,” Reishi admitted, startled to look up from his cooling tea and find Mikoto’s mouth curling at the corners, a different glint in those wild amber eyes.  Reishi frowned.  “Why are you smiling?” he asked, to which Mikoto shrugged, chasing a cluster of noodles around his half-empty bowl.

“No reason.  Just, I kind of liked you for a second there.”

The arrival of his ramen spared Reishi finding a reply.

The meal was better than he’d expected.  In fairness, Reishi couldn’t be certain if that judgment owed something to the late hour, the emptiness of his stomach, or the way the warm broth banished the chill that had been seeping through his coat, the rain nothing more than a memory now on the canvas roof.  Or maybe he could admit—reluctantly—that a little of it was the company, watching Mikoto lounge with his head tipped back and one hand braced on an empty stool, trading stories about his own busybodies as if he were talking about friends, not clansmen.

It was a nice change, Reishi decided, to share a meal with someone as if for an hour he weren’t a King.  He thought he caught a glimpse of the same relief on Mikoto’s face—Mikoto who was all these things he’d never imagined, playful and sardonic, the tension unwinding from his body until he was all but boneless on the next stool over, leaning into the counter and watching Reishi with his chin braced in his hand.  Watching for a moment of inattention, apparently, as his chopsticks swooped in and stole a slice of pork, lifting the entire cut from the bowl and cramming it into his mouth.

Reishi stared at him, astonished.  Mikoto just laughed.

“Hey, I warned you about that.”

“Unbelievable, Suoh,” Reishi murmured, shaking his head—but his mind was on something else, wondering if the person he’d been at war with until now, the man he recognized by the wildfire in his veins, was only the Red King, and he’d never made the acquaintance of this man at all.

As he paid his tab and stood to take his leave, turning up his collar against the cold, Reishi felt something brush his arm, the soft pressure of Mikoto’s hand grazing his elbow.

“Y’know, I might’ve spoken too soon before,” the man rumbled, catching Reishi’s dark eyes.  “About never coming back here, I mean.”

Reishi considered that for a moment, something like a smile flickering across his face.  “I suppose I’ve had worse evenings,” he conceded.

The way Mikoto ducked his head, he almost looked pleased.

“See you around?” he asked as Reishi stepped over the threshold—something oddly tentative in those words, a question that shouldn’t have come out as a question.

His inhale was sharp with the cold.  “Right.”

At the time, it was just an acknowledgment of inevitability, the odds that were in their favor as the Red and Blue Kings.  Even Reishi couldn’t have predicted how true it would become—that a noodle shop outside the industrial district was a place he would find himself gravitating again and again, surprised every time to find amber eyes waiting for him beyond the fall of red fabric.

 


	4. Two through Five

For the next two weeks, Reishi had Mikoto to himself.  The Silver King was an unpredictable visitor, splitting his time between looking in on them and commuting back to the city to take custody of everything Reishi had left behind—including the Blue clan, if the texts Reishi received from Fushimi were any indication, oscillating along his usual spectrum from snappish to snide.  Weismann was an enthusiastic scribe, too, keeping his phone chiming with stories of his days spent at Scepter 4 written out one hundred and sixty characters at a time, accompanied by a passel of strangely framed self-portraits featuring Weismann and familiar subordinate faces, all of whom looked younger than ever crowded around the Silver King.

He wondered if the constant barrage was Weismann’s way of filling the silence—if even from the distance of Shizume City, he could tell Reishi was feeling somewhat at odds with himself.  He had been the Blue King and nothing else for such a long time it was difficult to remember who he was outside of that role, to imagine what might fill the long hours that were suddenly his again.

He fell into the habit of leaving the house once a day, breaking his vigil to shower and retrieve a change of clothes from the small apartment three streets over.  From there he headed out into town in larger, concentric circles with the house as the focal point, acquainting himself with the storefronts of the artisan shops along the boardwalk, their windows glossy with pottery in the traditional style and black-lacquered jewelry boxes.  Sometimes he walked up the street instead, pausing in front of the grander house at the top of a rolling hill, all white stucco and wrought-iron accents—another property formerly belonging to the Gold King, now the Silver clan’s temporary residence.  He passed the train station and had to smile at the long line of beckoning cats set up in the shop window.

Often he stopped where the boardwalk opened onto the beach and stood for a while against the worn wooden rail, studying the silhouettes of faraway boats cut into the horizon.  He hadn’t yet found the will to step down into the sand.

Long afternoons at the house, he rediscovered what it was to read as a pastime, starting with the technical manuals and biochemistry tomes abandoned on the break room shelves and then moving through the stack of books brought by the Silver King—poetry and political theory, philosophy and classic literature, nothing published within the last seventy years.  Sometimes he read aloud to Mikoto, to fill the silence when he didn’t have it in him to relive things at best bittersweet.  He made himself smile imagining his odds of accomplishing a similar recitation if the man were conscious—let the collected works of August Wilhelm rest in his lap for a few minutes to picture the Red King lying on his back in front of the open patio doors, bothering the _manekineko_ and the rest of the Silver King’s eclectic souvenirs while the breeze made a game of tousling his scarlet hair.

The illusion broke on the glass of the chamber.  Reishi pulled back with his fingers aching, numb all the way to the bone.

 

* * *

 

 

His agreement to shower at the apartment had restored his right to meal delivery.  The fourth week, when the Silver clan was temporarily back in town, Yatogami Kuroh brought him lunch, and turned out to be a more accomplished chef than Reishi had first guessed.

Most of the time they had little to say to each other, excepting the fundamental courtesies on Reishi’s part.  But one afternoon, he couldn’t leave it at that.  He set the cooling box of fried noodles aside and cleared his throat, halting the younger swordsman just as he stepped onto the patio.

“The year when the Silver King was missing…” Kuroh turned to face him, and Reishi knit his hands, eyes locked on the chamber.  “Did you truly believe he was alive all that time?”

The young man was silent for a while.  “I couldn’t stand to think anything else,” he answered eventually.  In Reishi’s periphery, beyond the scope of corrective lenses, he was little more than a blur, a jagged rend in the blue of the sky.  “I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you.  I only thought he was dead for three days, and…”

Reishi let out a long breath.  “Honestly…I didn’t think I was going to live long enough to find out what it meant, to go on without him and the Kingship,” he said.  Then he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and found his politician’s smile, just enough of a veneer to excuse the young man and leave him alone once more with his specter, the beating heart at the center of the room.  Reishi abandoned his lunch and walked to stand beside Mikoto.

When his Sword of Damocles began to crack, Reishi had wasted no time arranging his endgame, assembling rooks and pawns on just the right squares to ensure his Kingship came to a close as cleanly as possible.  He would never have abandoned his obligations prematurely, as Mikoto had—but somewhere, in the deepest part of him, he couldn’t deny the tiny ember of relief that flared at the thought of his own death, the eventual closing of the void that had opened in him the moment he ran his sword through Mikoto, right to the hilt.  After the destruction of the Slates, in the smeared handful of days that preceded Weismann’s call, he had felt that void opening in him again.  And now he was here, on the edge of a second chance—to what end, when Mikoto was still out of his reach, forever cold and beautiful like a butterfly trapped in a specimen case?

Reishi pressed his hand to the front of the chamber.  He had seen enough scars to imagine what was concealed beneath the stark white sheet—the pucker of paler skin tucked into the cavity between ribs, dead to sensation, a stark reminder of that cold blue sword piercing him to the core.

“How could you do this to me?” Reishi whispered.  Then he pulled back and recused himself to the yard, because that was the last thing Mikoto needed to hear from him.

The back steps creaked beneath him as he sat down, pulled a cigarette from the half-empty pack in his front pocket with unsteady hands.  His thumb quivered over the spark wheel of the lighter.  When it finally ignited, he breathed deep and closed his eyes, lifting one hand to block out the radiance of the sun, the distant sea, the wind composing music in the leaves of the lemon trees.  Reishi bent until he could rest his head against one raised knee, the smoke of the Marlboro Red suffocating in the close air.  Since the fall, he only smoked Mikoto’s brand, but he didn’t smoke enough anymore to be used to it.  

In the last weeks, before Mikoto went down and the sky came down with him, Reishi had given him every chance to avert this.  The only conclusion he could come to, in the aftermath, was that Mikoto hadn’t wanted to be saved.  Maybe that hadn’t changed.  He couldn’t shake the sudden certainty that this—all of this—was just prolonged self-torture, an interminable mourning for something already lost. His inhale was acrid, scorching his tongue. 

He had no real concept of how much time passed before he heard a creak on the floorboards.

“Knock, knock—anyone home?” Reishi turned his head far enough to see Weismann step out onto the back porch, his arms bursting with the fins of a half-dozen rainbow pinwheels.  The Silver King smiled.  “You left half your lunch.  Kuroh’s a stickler about clean plates, you know.”

“I apologize.  That was ungracious of me,” Reishi replied, but even to his own ears, the words were stilted and hollow. 

Weismann laid the pinwheels down and moved to sit beside him, feet swinging a little where they dangled over the side of the porch—an invitation to talk or to be silent, whatever was most comforting.  Reishi wondered where the pinwheels were from.  He wondered how Weismann had learned to read people so well, hidden away in a silver airship for seven decades.

“That’s a bad habit, Reishi,” Weismann said mildly, wincing as he fanned the smoke of the cigarette away.

Reishi considered the ember glowing on the end of the filter.  “It wasn’t even my habit, originally,” he admitted.  “I only ever smoked when I was with him.”

The other man hummed.  “Well…some things you just don’t want to give up.”

Reishi chuckled under his breath.  Inhaled on the memory of the first drag—a night in early October when the cold rain had kept him longer than usual under the canvas roof of the ramen stall, off his guard and strangely reluctant to rectify that.  The way Mikoto’s hand carved back through his hair as he asked, _Seriously, it’s your birthday?—_ and then, though it was unwarranted, unwanted, dug through his pockets and came up with a safety pin and a ten-cent piece before offering Reishi his last cigarette, crumpling the empty cellophane pack in his hand.

_I don’t smoke_ , Reishi had told him.  Somehow he was reaching for the cigarette anyway, snaring it between two fingers—maybe just to watch that lazy smile break across Mikoto’s face, for the privilege of catching his balance as the Red King leaned in to bump their shoulders together.

_So give me some warning next year,_ he laughed, almost petulant, igniting a curl of red flame at his fingertip, a spark that leapt between them and left Reishi’s skin singing.  The overwhelming taste of tobacco and char, the same smoke burning in his lungs now, but so much sweeter for those words he’d swallowed down with it— _next year_.  By the next year, everything would be broken between them.

Reishi inhaled a last time and then surrendered the cigarette to the cement of the walk, the underside of his shoe.  He turned to Weismann—no, Shiro—and offered him a smile.  “Some addictions run too deep, I suppose.”

If only his addiction to Mikoto had been as trivial as his nicotine habit.

 

* * *

 

 

The calendar was Shiro’s installation.  Reishi had no particular investment in marking the passage of time, but he hadn’t found a persuasive reason to take it down, either, even if the illustrations of cats in yoga poses were not precisely to his taste.  To take it down would be an admission of something he was carefully not acknowledging, the clock that had been ticking in the back of his mind since he stepped out of a taxi and over a gutter swept with lemons, conscious from the first day that time was something he had too much and not enough of all at once.  He made a point of counting in weeks instead of days, because at anything less than a week his unit of measure kept dwindling until it was down to Mikoto’s essential elements, heartbeats and breaths.  Cut that small, the time was intolerable.

He stepped in from the back porch one evening in the fifth week, his fingers still warm with the caress of a cigarette, to find Shiro changing his calendar, clicking his tongue around the pushpin poised between his lips.

“We’re two weeks into the new month,” the Silver King scolded him, once the calendar was safely returned to the wall, this month’s feature a tabby performing an improbable handstand.  “If you don’t enjoy the pictures, you’re missing half the point.”

Reishi didn’t feel it was worth correcting him: that he was carefully missing the whole point.  He wanted to embrace time as a relative concept, to believe that it wouldn’t move for him until it moved for Mikoto.

Shiro smiled as if he could read all of that in Reishi’s schooled features.  “Be careful about letting the time slip by,” he said, turning to look out across the harbor and the late boats on the water.  “You’d be surprised how easily it can get away from you.”

Reishi didn’t reply.  Backlit by the sunset, the Silver King seemed older than usual, tenuous, as if Reishi were viewing him from a great distance and one flicker of the rippling white curtains might erase him.  In the moment of silence, he noticed the things that had escaped him at first glance: the black overnight bag tucked just inside the door and the heavier white longcoat draped around Weismann’s shoulders, the kind suited to unpredictable weather.  The small green light blinking inside his pocket, a call or a text message that had gone unanswered.  Reishi straightened his glasses.

“You haven’t come by just to update my calendar,” he surmised.

The Silver King sighed.  “Actually, I came to talk to Mikoto.”

“Mikoto?” Reishi repeated, surprised by how easily Shiro said that name that still burned Reishi’s tongue every time.

The other man brushed strands of silver hair back from his face, tucking them behind his ear.  “Mm.  I need a sounding board.  He’s a very good listener,” Shiro said—and though that was all he said, Reishi recognized the statement for what it was, offering him a graceful out if he wasn’t feeling up to bearing this confidence.

Reishi shook his head.  “Listening, yes—but I haven’t gotten much out of him in the way of advice,” he replied, and was pleased to have made his visitor laugh.  Then he took both wicker chairs by their top rails and inclined his head, inviting Shiro out onto the patio.

“I’m thinking of taking an impromptu trip,” the Silver King said once they were settled, seated side by side staring out over the inlet and the fishing boats cleaving white wakes into the darkening water.

Reishi lifted an eyebrow.  “Oh?  Don’t tell me the Gold King left you more places like this to look in on.”

Weismann chuckled.  “Not exactly.  Though it does have to do with the Lieutenant.” They watched a flock of birds cut across the sunset, the shadow calligraphy of black wings.  “There’s a warehouse the Gold Rabbits would like me to visit.  It’s the place the Lieutenant stored everything from the airship—everything that survived the crash, anyway.”

“Everything of yours,” Reishi realized.

It wasn’t a revelation, precisely, but it was a connection he rarely made—the monolithic Silver King, the First King, untouchable in his fortress in the clouds, with the man sitting shoulder to shoulder with him now, pale hands folded delicately in his lap.  He hadn’t known Shiro yet when the airship went down, had been far too absorbed in the game of kings to understand it as someone’s loss, someone’s house on fire.  The sky was on fire, too, and he studied it for a long moment, the riot of Mikoto’s colors bleeding into the water.

“Are you afraid of what you might have lost?” he asked.  Absently he pictured stacks of singed papers and gray photographs in thick-bound books, the things the Silver King might carry with him when he was leaving the world behind.

Shiro pulled in a breath slowly.  “No.  Well.  In a way, it’s simpler than that.  There wasn’t much to lose, after all.” He looked down and Reishi followed his gaze, watched the pad of one thumb sweeping his knuckles.  “I’ve been thinking…perhaps I should make my trip a little more permanent.”

“Permanent?” Reishi echoed.  The day had been warm, but there was a chill to it now, the threat of dusk cutting through the light cotton of his button-down.  “Permanent as in, retreating to an airship for another seventy years?”

Weismann gave a soft laugh.  “Now that _would_ be ridiculous.  No one can even be sure I’ll live seventy more years.  The Gold clan’s scientists tell me it’s all guesswork at this point—when I’ll start aging normally again, when I’ll run out of time.”

“Is that what this is about?” Reishi asked, more gently.  “Not wanting to leave someone behind if…something untoward happens?”

He meant Kuroh, of course, the faithful shadow who’d hardly left his side since his miraculous return—but even with his back turned, he couldn’t keep his thoughts from straying to Mikoto, the glimmer of scarlet perpetually caught in the corner of his eye.

Weismann was the first person in a decade who could smile at Reishi in a way that made him feel alarmingly young.  “That’s a very noble sentiment, Reishi.  But I’m afraid this is utterly selfish.” The Silver King was an enigma, a living silhouette in the fading light, and Reishi could read so little in those faraway hazel eyes.  “I’ve already lived an entire life, and I lost everything I had in it.  Maybe I’m not ready to do it all over again.” He turned to the Blue King with a flicker of a smile.  “Would that be so wrong?” he asked softly, and Reishi bit back the words that had been on the tip of his tongue, an admonishment for making someone wait so long that wasn’t really meant for him.

Ultimately, Reishi didn’t know Shiro well enough to know what he’d lost, except in the abstract: a city, a family, a war, crown and castle and the few keepsakes he’d carried with him, and finally his oldest friend, his last tether to a world that had winked out seventy years ago.  Even objectively, it was devastating.  It was hard to condemn him for his reluctance to sift through the ashes of that.  Reishi sat back in his chair and watched Weismann for a minute or two—this man who had been watching the world for such a long time, but from too wide an angle, until all of the details blurred.

“I can see why you wanted to talk to Mikoto,” he said finally, and found half a smile himself when Shiro blinked at him.  “He knows a little about watching your world go up in flames.”

His instinct was to rest a hand on the other man’s shoulder, but he was badly out of practice with gestures like that.  He settled for holding Shiro’s gaze.

“I don’t think anyone could fault you for feeling that way.  But I also think you’ll regret it if you leave now.” He tipped his head toward the city below them, the rattle of the train rolling into the station like a line of liquid silver.  “Go see the warehouse.  And then go back to Kuroh and just…give it a little time.  You might find there are still some things worth the risk.” He left it there, didn’t feel any compulsion to put the rest into words—not with the sepulcher of glass at his back, living in this strange shell of a house that was like a mausoleum to missed opportunities.

It was only when Shiro collected his case and started down the patio steps, waxed-paper bags from an authentic German bakery left like offerings on the table, that it occurred to Reishi to say something else.  He stepped to the railing and cleared his throat, feeling awkward in a way he so rarely had in his official capacity.

“If you ever need to talk to Mikoto again…” Shiro paused, turned back with his eyebrows raised.  Reishi lifted a hand to block the sun off the water.  “I go down to the boardwalk most afternoons.  You’ll have the house to yourself.”

Shiro smiled, the teasing lilt back in his voice as he chided, “While you keep the beautiful beach walk all to yourself?”

Reishi blinked, stumbling over his manners.  “No, I didn’t mean…I’m sorry. Of course you’re welcome to join me any time…”

The Silver King laughed.  “Maybe I will.”

Watching the other man disappear down the quiet street, Reishi wondered if he’d gotten what he came for.  Then he carried the chairs back inside and sat next to Mikoto, and tried to imagine what he would have said in Reishi’s place.

“Would you have told him to run?” he asked the silent figure, and thought for once he preferred not to have an answer from the Red King, who couldn’t find a reason to wake up.


	5. Six and Seven

The sixth week was rain.  One night, the storm fought its way inside, and Reishi woke from a dead sleep to the crash of the patio doors flying open and into the wall.  The curtains and the shimmer of the driving rain were just a haze without his glasses.  Shaken and disoriented, he stumbled to Mikoto first, bent to run his hands blindly over the chamber.  The wet curtains whipped his face as he slammed the patio doors and locked them for the first time.

Reishi leaned back into the wall, listening to the frenzy of the storm, a relentless staccato on the roof.  It took him several minutes to understand that the smears of yellow at his feet were lemons, chased inside by the rough winds.  Six weeks of souvenirs lay in tumult across the floor.

Reishi considered it all for a moment while his exhaustion beat in him like a second heart.  Then he crossed the room and fell to his knees beside the casket, pressing his forehead to the place where Mikoto’s forehead would be, if he could trust his fingers to undo the latch.  The rain in his hair and on his face made stars of the iridescent glass.

“It feels like it’s always a storm between us,” he murmured.

Mikoto chose not to disagree.  Reishi turned his head, rested his cheek against the fog of his breath as he stared at the rain beyond the window, just an intimation of strife and movement to his imperfect eyes.

Since his ascension as the Blue King, he had felt storms differently, as if they ignited something in his marrow, fervent and narcotic.  It had been that way for Mikoto, too.  He remembered the white strobe of lightning rippling through the livid sky and illuminating the Red King, his mouth stretched into a fierce grin, some wild part of him thrilled to be at war with the storm.  Reishi hadn’t been able to deny the satisfaction of that synergy as Mikoto’s reflection chased his across the walls of skyscrapers, Homura and Scepter 4 united for once in pursuit of a Strain—no more than he could deny the live wire that lanced through him when Mikoto took a bad blow and hit the high-rise like a bonfire, the black storm turning the endless windows into a hall of mirrors.  He watched the Red King crumple in every pane of glass.

His first instinct had been to run to him.  But even in the heat of it, that moment of panic before the Red King rolled over and uncoiled from the flames, he had been clear-headed enough to recognize that that instinct belonged to Reishi, not the Blue King, and Reishi wasn’t on this battlefield.  It was the Blue King— _not Reishi_ —who held his ground and oversaw the arrest of the Strain, and stared through the rain as the Red King— _not Mikoto_ —got to his feet, shrugged off the hands he didn’t need to hold him up, not here.  The Red King led his knights and bishops away into the fog, unrepentant as ghosts, and the Blue King watched them go and wondered how that fondness had crept into him without his notice, when he had started to see Mikoto first.  The sparks that riddled the air like land mines left a caustic taste in his mouth. 

“Even after all this time, there’s still a distance between us, Mikoto,” Reishi said, and held the name on his tongue for a moment, savoring the instant when he was almost waiting for an answer.  “I never understood how to cross that.  Maybe if I had…you wouldn’t be lying here, on the wrong side of the glass.”

 

* * *

 

 

In the ten years since his promotion to the head of Scepter 4, Reishi had only made one friend.  So he was surprised and pleased to find, seven weeks into his tenure in the city by the sea, that it was happening again.

As the Blue King, he’d had so little time to get to know Shiro Weismann.  The Silver King was blithe and effervescent, with an unbreakable mask of geniality that had always struck him as a costume, just the manner in which Weismann chose to wear his Kingship—like his own stern, formal smile, like the lazy outrage that had characterized Mikoto as the Red King.  What he hadn’t expected was to discover that the man underneath the mask was the Silver King turned up to eleven—spirited, good-humored, easily carried away and caught up in things, though what he had in enthusiasm he somewhat lacked in follow-through, trading out his crazes like socks.

He had a poor tolerance for seafood.  He had a scientist’s passion for anything new, the terra incognita of evolving culture, and his taste in souvenirs was consistently a few decades off—hence the lava lamp, the slinky, and the black-and-white cat clock with ticking tail that had followed him back to the house.  Fortunately, Shiro had also missed the proliferation of the AA battery, which spared Reishi having to explain why the cat suddenly stopped moving after it kept him up for the second night in a row.

And there was nothing Weismann enjoyed more than catching people off guard.  He seemed to take a particular joy in flirting—with Reishi, with Kuroh especially, even with the young man who ran the crepe shop on the boardwalk and always fumbled his change, eternally flustered by the playful silver-haired creature bending across the counter to retrieve a crepe dripping with strawberries and whipped cream.  He wore a charmed smile as he licked drips of chocolate sauce from his fingers and walked with Reishi along the storefronts—and in that smile, Reishi thought he could see the unburdening of a heart that had been imprisoned for a long time, the gradual relaxing of muscles that had been tensed to run the day he came to talk on the patio, uncertain how much a new life had to offer him.  It was a pleasure to watch him uncovering the answer to that question, a little at a time.

Reishi hadn’t expected the Silver King back from the city until the weekend.  So he was surprised to return from his first walk on the beach, his sand-crusted shoes dangling from one hand and a cache of white thumbnail seashells drying in his pocket, to find Shiro Weismann waiting for him, wearing a red-and-white-striped tank top that bore a grinning image of Waldo, augmented by the words _A Good Man Is Hard to Find_. 

 “Ah, Reishi!  Welcome home.” Shiro beckoned him toward the wicker table crowded with unfamiliar parcels.  “I come bearing gifts.  I stopped by your apartment and cleaned out your closet—there’s really a limit to the number of days you can wear the same seven outfits, you know.”

“I don’t recall giving you my key,” Reishi replied mildly, eyeing the blue button-down and rumpled slacks effecting their escape from the topmost box.  The Silver King laughed.

“Fushimi was most helpful in that regard. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was just dying for the chance to poke through your things.  I doubt he found anything, though…probably would have been in a better mood.  This is from him—he was worried you might catch cold,” Shiro added, pressing a bundle of navy-blue wool into Reishi’s arms.  Reishi quirked one eyebrow, recognizing the heavy collar of the overcoat he’d forgotten in his office and missed that first morning on the train platform, senseless and numb, his limbs slowly ossifying in the dark.

“I’m fairly certain Fushimi can’t make me a present of my own coat,” he replied.  He blinked as a clear bag rustling with saltwater taffy was added to the pile.

“And that’s from Kuroh and I,” Shiro went on, as if Fushimi’s relative claim to his outerwear were not in dispute.  “We looked all over Shizume City for a shop with honey-flavored taffy—you did say that’s your favorite, right?”

Reishi had forgotten divulging that.  The memory of exactly when it had come up pulled his lips into a smile, recognition dawning as he examined the motif on the gift bag.  “You bought this at the train station, didn’t you?”

Weismann laughed, as if equally delighted to be caught in a lie as to get away with one.  “Well, originally I wanted to bring you butterscotch cookies from the bakery near Scepter 4.  But we stopped by Homura before we caught the train, and by the time I filled all those eager hands, the bag was empty.”

“That does seem like a worthy cause,” Reishi conceded.

For a moment his mind was filled with the smoke and haze of the familiar bar on the corner of a cobbled street, worn leather and gleaming wood and a handful of pictures tacked up over the corner table, precious faces under panes of glass.  The thought drew him back to Mikoto; he abandoned his shoes and the rest of the curios and crossed to the chamber, tracing absent fingertips down the faraway line of the Red King’s pale cheek.  Always, when he left the house, he wondered on the threshold if he would come back to find Mikoto beating at the frontpiece, scorching amber eyes staring up at him through the glass.  It was enough to make him hesitate every time.  Reishi slid his thumb down the instrument panel, kindling the flicker of status screens.  No change.

“How are they—the Red clansmen?” he asked, for the man who couldn’t.

“Same as ever,” Shiro told him.  “Anna’s going to start school next month—something I understand Miss Awashima arranged, after dear Mister Kusanagi suffered through some very strenuous negotiations.”

Reishi chuckled.  “Mikoto would be appalled.”

“Well, that’s what he gets for oversleeping,” Shiro replied, laughing along with him.

Reishi shook his head.  It was a relief he could not put into words—how the knots inside of him unraveled with the easy way Shiro spoke to him, spoke about Mikoto, as if he were just another part of the conversation instead of the ghost in the room, the spindle around which their strange syzygy revolved.  It made this seem less hopeless, on the days when Reishi felt himself beginning to falter.  He doubted he could ever truly convey his gratitude for that.

From what had become his customary position, seated on the floor with his back pressed to the chamber, Reishi listened through the hush of the distant sea while Weismann spun out the tales of his time in the city, everything under its sleepless lights somehow novel and lustrous through his eyes.  The wind picked up and caught in the white curtains, billows of cloth obscuring the view of low-hanging clouds massing at the horizon, a storm taking its time in the breaking.

He couldn’t help thinking Mikoto would like this man—this man who had dragged Fushimi and Kuroh through the entertainment district until the long hours of the night, whose complaint with electronic club music was that you couldn’t jitterbug to it and whose phone was a quarrel of off-kilter photos: Weismann in his white coat wrapped around an irate Fushimi; a similar picture hours later where the coat was on Fushimi and the Silver King had misplaced his shoes; seven pictures in a row of Kuroh’s bare abs, which Shiro didn’t remember taking and about which Reishi was unwilling to inquire; a juddering, erratic video from the middle of the dance floor, glow sticks and stage lights shivering in the frame like the eyes of ships on an unsteady sea.  Shiro’s prolonged laughter was the only recognizable sound.

It made Reishi smile to think of him like that, running barefoot and wild through the city, preoccupied by what he had instead of what he had to lose.  Or maybe he owed that smile to the memory of a similar drunken night he had shared with Mikoto; he hadn’t lost any shoes, but that might have been preferable to finding himself sitting beside the Red King on the rim of a public swimming pool, dangling his legs over the edge—Mikoto’s playful shove that sent them both into the pool fully clothed, and the minute of mad flailing before they realized they were in the shallow end.  Mikoto throwing his head back and laughing under stars or city lights, Reishi couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

The days when their clash had begun to feel like nothing more serious than a friendly rivalry, Mikoto’s smile between the tongues of flame beckoning _Catch me if you can._   A night when, against his better judgment, he followed Mikoto beyond a _No Trespassing_ sign and tipped his head back to watch the fireworks of a city festival rip the sky open at its seams, listened to that low voice admiring, _They_ _burn out quick, but at least they go out with a bang_.  A time when he recognized the feeling in his stomach as vertigo, but hadn’t yet understood that flight inevitably ended in fall.

On his way out that afternoon, Weismann rested his fingers against the doorframe and paused just at the place where the house opened onto the patio, masked for a moment by the curtains that were starting to froth like sea foam in the rising winds.

“Ah, by the way…I mentioned that it’s possible to have the capsule open without disengaging the stasis programs, didn’t I?” Reishi felt the muscles in his back tense as the Silver King tucked a hand into his pocket, fiddling with one of the honey-brown taffies.  “We can’t do it all the time, of course, but…I think it might be good to leave it open once in a while.  Just to see what happens.”

His tone was light, but there was an undercurrent to it that Reishi couldn’t place—a note of warning like the rush of the leaves in the lemon trees outside, the garden in turmoil over the coming storm.  The glass under Reishi’s hand had become agonizingly cold, all the warmth of his walk on the beach draining out of him as he cleared his throat, put into words what had carefully remained unspoken until now.

“This system…it relied on the power of the Slates, didn’t it?”

Weismann smiled, the sheer film of the gauze curtain cutting between them like a veil.  “Don’t worry, Reishi.  I’m sure it will hold on for quite some time.”

Reishi didn’t reply.  He didn’t want to say what was on his mind—that as a tactician, it was impossible for him not to comprehend the gamble the Silver King was proposing: even if this cost them time, it was a risk they had to take, because what Reishi had been doing wasn’t working.  He didn’t want to say that he’d come to recognize the expression on Shiro’s face as the other man saying something he wished were true, a certain little smile that begged Reishi not to push, because this was a lie that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Against his nature, he let Shiro go without further questions, obliged to trust that the Silver King was telling him what he needed to hear—because if he knew how slim the odds were, he might start saying goodbye.


	6. Eight through Eleven

Having the chamber open was a new agony.  Mikoto had looked deathly within the capsule—but with the frontpiece raised along its invisible hinge, he was almost unbearably alive, as if at any moment his lashes might flicker back, reveal the resurrected spark in searing amber eyes.  Reishi lost twenty minutes the first day of the eighth week just watching him breathe, the rise and fall of the white sheet suddenly perceptible without reflective glass in between them.

It took three days and a great deal of prodding from Shiro before Reishi found the nerve to touch him.  When he did, he was startled by the warmth of Mikoto’s skin, the way it gave under the halting pressure of his fingertips.  Mikoto had always struck him as an innately physical person, but there had been so little touch between them.  He drove himself mad wondering if the Red King’s hair was growing, smoothing the scarlet strands down against the curve of his neck and letting his thumb hover for a moment over the pulse point at Mikoto’s throat.  He always pulled back with the nerves in his hand tingling, singed.

It reminded him of a night beneath the ramen shop’s canopy when Mikoto had leaned in, unexpectedly, hooking the tip of one finger around the stem of Reishi’s glasses and pulling them down his nose.  _How much d’you need these, anyway?_ Mikoto had asked, half of him out of focus and half of him in perfect clarity. 

_I’m a little nearsighted_ , Reishi admitted. He regretted the imperfection of his sight again as Mikoto held his gaze over the rims, his expression unreadable.

_Oh yeah?_ Mikoto leaned in, his knee against Reishi’s thigh burning like a coal.  _How close do I have to get so you can see me?_

Reishi wondered what he’d have seen in those searing amber eyes, at that moment, if he hadn’t been off balance and half blind.

He spent hours walking down on the shore, and on his way back lingered in front of the display windows of the artisan shops that lined the boardwalk.  In the ten years he’d lived in the city, he had done very little to personalize his apartment, primarily because he was never home.  But recently, Reishi had found himself coming back to Mikoto with keepsakes of his own, a sequence of small, carefully made objects that caught his eye: a music box of inlaid wood, ornamented by a harbor scene fashioned from the interplay of light and dark grains, and which played Chopin when the lid was folded back; a hand-cut puzzle in a pattern of rising cranes that he’d left unfinished on the floor beside the chamber, the brilliant white of paper wings shivering as if on the verge of flight.

Most recent was an asymmetrical black teacup in the _raku_ style, which he spun carefully with the tip one finger, admiring the blush of copper burnished into the glaze.  It reminded him of a similar piece on a shelf in his apartment, a memento from the traditional tea ceremony he had attended with the Gold King years ago, shortly after his Sword of Damocles appeared.  It took a moment to remember that Mikoto had been there, too, slouching on the other side of Daikaku Kokujoji with a dour expression; though the features were the same, somehow that young man seemed divorced from the one he had come to know so well, just a specter of the Red King in a time before that had meant much to him.

On the last day before the eighth week became the ninth, Reishi pulled the sheet carefully away from Mikoto until he could take in the tidal whisper of breath beneath his skin, the white scars cut like constellations across the planes of his ribs, bleak mementos of all the places the world had torn into him.  He rested his hand over the cluster of distorted tissue beneath Mikoto’s heart, regretting that the worst scar was the one he’d inflicted.

 

* * *

 

 

By the ninth week, the Silver clan was back in town all but full time.  On days that were the exception, Reishi walked Shiro and Kuroh down to the train station and listened with an absent smile to stories of the war Miyabi was waging against her dorm’s cleaning robot or the grand reopening of the Homura bar, a legitimate place of business now, though the event was briefly shuttered when Fushimi and Yata picked another fight and brought down an entire shelf of top-class liquor, perhaps proving the place hadn’t entirely lost its unruly spirit.  Reishi watched the train pull away from the platform wondering if he would recognize it anymore, a city without clans or colors, without further use for its Kings.

One afternoon found him and Shiro bent over the white wicker table engaged in a game of Chinese checkers, which the Silver King had discovered buried in the basement of the grand house on the hill.  “There are all manner of treasures hidden away in there,” Shiro said as he exhumed the board and marbles from within an ancient cardboard box.  “It’s impossible to guess what we might find as we delve deeper.”

Reishi didn’t reply, intrigued by the yellow-gray slip of wrinkled paper that gave the rules in German, the word _Stern-Halma_ embossed in large block letters across the cardboard flaps.  He wondered if this was a souvenir, something more precious preserved here than flaking tin and colored glass.  He accepted Weismann’s challenge on the condition that he could play both red and blue.

In terms of strategy, Chinese checkers was a little beneath them.  Reishi didn’t mind.  It was nice to have something to do with his hands while Shiro splashed paint across the canvas of the city, detailing the dissolution of the Green and Gold clans, the transition of Scepter 4 to a government institution, the wounds the Slates system had inflicted slowly scabbing over.  The lemons were overripe now in the trees, and their sharp, sweet smell broke over him like a crescendo every time the breeze rushed against the open windows, chasing away the first fingers of heat, the premonition of the oncoming summer.  A leaf fluttered in from the patio and touched down on the glass of the chamber, and Reishi felt his breath hitch, as if that tiny aberration might wake the Red King when nothing else had.  He wondered if Mikoto would wake up in time to enjoy any of spring before it slipped away.

“Not to impinge your strategy, Reishi, but you’re being a bit protective of the red marbles.”

Reishi blinked, forcing his attention back to the board.  “Am I?” He had been playing unconsciously, realized only now that he had arrayed the blue marbles into a crooked line like checkpoints, ideal for jumping red marbles into the goal triangle one after another.

Shiro held a white marble against his lips for a moment before tiptoeing over a yellow one and into his goal.  “At this rate, you’ll owe Kuroh and me dinner at the chowder house after all.” But even as he said it, he was distracted by his cell phone chiming, the third time in as many minutes.  The lingering notes of a German folk song hung in the air as he painstakingly answered the text, hunting out each letter with uncertain thumbs.

Reishi chuckled.  “You seem a bit preoccupied yourself.”

His opponent sighed.  “It’s Kuroh.  He wants to know where I am.”

“Where are you?” Reishi asked.  Though he had yet to decipher the rules, he was gradually growing accustomed to these strange games between the Silver King and his shadow—an endless push-pull that would settle out, he supposed, when their relationship was not quite so new.

There was unquestionable affection in the way Shiro rolled his eyes, though he looked at least as exasperated.  “As far as he knows, I’m up at the house, checking out the state of the blinds.  He had to go into the city to double-check our order for the kitchen appliances…something about the wrong surface on the range top.  I’m supposed to evaluate the window dressings.  Which I will do—before he gets back.” Weismann sighed and moved a yellow marble out of turn; Reishi chose not to call him on it.  “Our neighbors have darling curtains.  Maybe I can trade them some antique German furniture, or this enormous Easter egg I found buried in another box…”

Reishi laughed with him, though his reply was softer, more serious.  “You’re going to be staying there?  In the house on the hill?”

Shiro’s smile was aimed over his shoulder, as if he were smiling at someone else entirely, the old friend he paid homage to with the advancement of a golden marble.

“The Lieutenant knew me very well.  The gardens, the view of the ocean, the big porch off the master bedroom…” He shook his head.  “The house is perfect for me—or, I imagine it was, fifty years ago.  Now it needs all these upgrades, and Kuroh has been so wound up about furnishing.” Weismann propped his chin on his palm as Reishi took his turn, one more crimson marble safely home.  “I told him we should go mattress shopping first, try everything out…you should have seen how red he got.”

“You seem to enjoy giving him a hard time,” Reishi remarked, to which Shiro just laughed, waving a dismissive hand.

“He’s trying to grow up too fast. Needs to hold onto that sense of humor.” The Silver King leaned back in his chair, vibrant and eternal again, his voice like chimes on a soft wind. “The newest tests suggest I’ll start aging normally in a few years, once the power of the Slates wears off.  He’ll catch up soon, so I have to have my fun while I can.”

Reishi studied him for a moment in the warm afternoon light, while the spring wind brushed its lips against his ear.  There was nothing distant about those hazel eyes anymore, as if this were a completely different person from the one who had sat on the porch just four weeks ago, ready to run.  It reminded Reishi of the way Mikoto had looked those nights when they met for ramen and the Red King receded, for a little while, leaving a young man who was all these things he’d never imagined—playful and sardonic, with a low, breathy laugh, all but boneless on the next stool over as he watched Reishi through half-lidded eyes.  A young man who reached over sometimes and stole a slice of pork right out of his bowl, chuckling as he crammed the whole cut in his mouth.  It was an intrusion Reishi allowed because it was not the Red King making it.  Under the canvas roof, he was only ever Mikoto.

He thought he could see that kind of liberation in Shiro’s face, too, now that he’d made his peace with things.  A peace Mikoto hadn’t been able to find, in the end.

“It’s nice to hear you preparing for the future,” he said.

Shiro shrugged.  “I didn’t have to do much preparing, really.  The Lieutenant took care of nearly everything.” For a second, his expression was absently fond, as if dusting off an old memory—then his eyes came back to Reishi’s and he picked up a white marble, evaluating his move while the sphere of milky glass spun in his fingertips.  “Have you ever seen someone flirting over Chinese checkers?”

In another context, it might have been an overture, but there was no mistaking where the Silver King’s affections lay.  Reishi pushed his glasses up by the corner of the frames.  “Actually, you’re my first opponent in nearly twenty-three years. Before that, I confess I wasn’t paying much attention.”

Weismann shook his head.  “My sister was an excellent flirt.  She had to be clever about it, you know…the Lieutenant was endlessly concerned with propriety, especially given the differences between cultures.  He didn’t want to do anything that would impinge Claudia’s honor—which, in that day and age, made it difficult for the three of us to do too much together.”  He chuckled.  “Board games, though.  Board games were safe.  Family friendly.”

With the marble poised in his long, elegant fingertips and that certain smile on his lips, Shiro Weismann had a classic beauty—not Reishi’s taste, particularly, but he could certainly recognize that the Silver King had the propensity to be stunning.  He wondered if the same had been true of his sister.  More than that, he was honored their confidence had begun to go both ways, amused by the thought of this shy, stiff young man who bore so little outward resemblance to the Gold King as Reishi had known him.

“I was never that good at Stern-Halma,” Shiro confessed.  “Luckily, the Lieutenant was so distracted by my sister that it was very easy to cheat. And he was such an honorable man that if he couldn’t remember exactly where my marble had been before I moved it, he’d let me get away with it.”

“Should I be concerned?” Reishi asked.

Shiro laughed.  “That depends.  How many times have you caught me playing out of turn this game?”

Reishi’s eyes widened.  “You were doing that intentionally?”

Weismann’s Cheshire smile seemed to answer for him.  “If the play goes uncontested, it doesn’t count as cheating.”

Reishi could only shake his head, recognizing that in Chinese checkers, as in most things, the Silver King had him utterly outmatched.

It wasn’t until they were packing the game away, the promise of a dinner for three at the seaside restaurant settled, that Shiro hesitated, rolling one red marble in the palm of his hand.  “What would you do, after this?” he asked.  “Would you go back to the city?”

Weismann was always careful with his tenses, suggesting neither if nor when.  Reishi breathed in and held the scent of lemons in his lungs, the undeniable proof that time was passing.

“That depends on Mikoto,” he said.

Still, the question stayed with him for a long time—as did the image of Shiro pausing in the doorway, bright against the rich blue inlet as he tossed a last smile over his shoulder.

“…You know, there’s a house for sale just down the street from ours.  Maybe you should think about investing in some real estate.”

 

* * *

 

 

The tenth week—leaning back in a booth at the local chowder house, celebrating the Silver clan’s permanent move into town and his defeat at Chinese checkers, shaking his head as Kuroh took liberal samples from every plate, determined to replicate anything that appealed to Shiro’s palate—Reishi caught himself turning as if to say something to the air at his shoulder.  He stared at the vase of red sage flowers, the glimmer of scarlet caught in the corner of his eye, and realized he had become far too used to this: his absence, his ghost.  The knowledge carved him out, left him empty beneath his breastbone.  He walked home breathing carefully, wary of collapse.

The house was silent, as always.  Reishi opened the chamber and traced the pad of his thumb over the curve of Mikoto’s eyebrow, down the contour of his cheekbone to the corner of his mouth, pausing over the dry skin of his bottom lip.

“How long are you going to wait before coming back to me?” he murmured, and missed the rain for the sound of something breaking down the walls.

One night, with the first whispers of autumn striating the trees, Reishi had ducked the flapping red flags of the ramen stall and stepped out into a fine rain, the granite cobbles shimmering under his shoes.  He was partway down the street before he realized Mikoto had followed him out, shifting in his worn black sneakers, one hand fiddling with the glinting chain suspended between the pockets of his jeans.

_I’m goin’ the same way_.  _We could walk back together, if you want._

Reishi studied his expression, weighing the words against the hunch of Mikoto’s shoulders under his heavy coat, the way the halo of fogged light hid the dark circles lurking beneath the embers of his eyes.  He was all too conscious of the subdued look the other man had worn on and off all night, of the first hairline cracks spreading through the Red Sword.  He wondered how long Mikoto would last before he was forced to abdicate.  He wondered how Mikoto could bear to stand there looking like that, hands pressed deep into his pockets, wearing how badly he wanted something written all over his face.

It was just a short walk.  That couldn’t be too much to ask.  Reishi turned, beckoning with a crook of his head, and Mikoto closed the distance between them at a jog, looking impossibly pleased to have been given this small thing.

They walked slowly, wringing fifteen minutes out of the five blocks to the point where the road diverged.  Reishi hesitated there and found Mikoto already looking at him when he turned, neither of them willing to say that there was no moving forward until they parted ways, that this was as close as they’d ever come to crossing a line.

There was a moment when the night hung between them as if suspended on gossamer thread—a moment in which Reishi thought he could read something in Mikoto’s eyes, could almost hear Mikoto asking him something, telling him something that would make everything make sense, three months later, when they met at midnight in the glistening snow, trading cigarette smoke for promises they couldn’t keep, the Red Sword and its King already chewed up and spit out.  He had the sense then that they were like stars on diverging courses, that even close enough to reach out and touch him there was still a great distance between them, the vastness of a dark, uncharted sea.  He wanted to cross it all the same.  Then Mikoto’s phone rang and he ducked his head, and the moment broke with the silence, left its shards in Reishi’s lungs when he breathed in.

Mikoto turned away with a smile caught in the corner of his mouth, weak like an ember already burning down.  _See you around_ , he said over his shoulder— _See you around_ , not _See you next time_ , as if somehow he already knew that had been the last time.

 

* * *

 

 

The sale was finalized almost before Reishi came to terms with it.  His understanding had been that buying property took longer; but unlike Shizume City, this was a buyer’s market, and the house down the street from Shiro and Kuroh’s had been vacant a long time.  From a front walk of gray flagstones, the old-fashioned bronze key led him into another empty shell of a house, this one stripped even of appliances, of all but the wood floors and the seafoam-blue walls.  After eleven weeks, Reishi found himself strangely at ease with the void.

He had no comprehension of how to furnish a house.  He was relieved to find this was something that could be delegated, for a fee.  In a small pocket of days, he arranged for appliances to be delivered, for the bare rooms to be recentered around simple, dark-wood furniture, and for the last of his personal effects to be shipped north from the city.  The box waiting for him at the post office was filled with out-of-season pullovers, books he’d never found the time to read, a twelve-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle and the original black teacup sheathed in pale cerulean gauze, such care taken in the wrapping that he wondered if Awashima had done it herself.  He would have to thank her for that—for so many things—when all of this was over.

He knew he couldn’t assume Mikoto would want to stay with him, or even to stay _here_ , in this town, amid the cobble of old houses and narrow streets and wild citrus groves.  Still he couldn’t stop himself from seeing everything about the house through that lens: the large sitting room badly in need of a television and a couch, the kind that could accommodate the sprawl of long, languid limbs; the larger bedroom, _Mikoto’s bedroom_ in his mind, for which he’d ordered a king-sized bed and smiled a little at that; the wide porch that lay heavy under the afternoon sunlight, and offered glimpses of the bright sea through the gaps in the trees.  Sometimes when he sat beside the chamber, Reishi tried to transpose the image in his mind, to picture Mikoto laid out instead across the slats of the old wood porch, sleeping in the sun in a garden thick with the scent of lemon trees.  He framed the sliding door in long white curtains and stood for a while just watching them breathe, translucent as smoke.

Shiro stopped in one afternoon with his arms clamped around a small-model cleaning robot, a fugitive from the house on the hill.

“Don’t turn this on until after I leave,” the Silver King warned, holding out a long ivory sleeve marred by what looked like machine oil.  “It nearly took my arm off when I went for the plug.”

“I doubt it’s programmed to hold a grudge,” Reishi said, abandoning his task of arranging kitchen implements and trying to decide what the bent spatula was for.

Shiro tucked the robot under the counter, into the alcove that would eventually belong to the dishwasher.  “Apparently, something about me offends robots on a very fundamental level,” he replied.  “Trust me, it’ll remember.” When he straightened, Reishi noticed a bag swinging from his shoulder, a blue-striped tote with the name of the port embroidered in crisp golden letters.  “I just stopped in for a minute to see how it’s going.  I’m meeting Kuroh at the harbor, and then he’s going to take me for a ride on the ferry.” That familiar scientist’s enthusiasm shone in his face as he laughed.  “Isn’t that thrilling?  The last ferry I rode was a hydrofoil!”

Reishi had the sense that even seventy years ago, hydrofoils had been on their way out—but he let it be, gave up on finding precisely the right drawer for the cheese grater and led Shiro from room to room, occupying with words the hollows furniture would eventually fill.  Now that he was seeing it through someone else’s eyes, he realized the house was embarrassingly lacking in personal touch, the only ornamentation the matching black teacups perched on the polished wood mantel.  But Shiro said nothing about it, had no criticism at all until Reishi pushed back the door to his own bedroom, revealing a few hangers swaying in the empty closet and a narrow mattress on an unadorned frame.

Shiro frowned.  “Oh, Reishi.  That will never work.  You’re going to have to upgrade that bed, post haste.”

Reishi narrowed his eyes at the bed, nearly identical to the one he had slept in for the last ten years.  “Why?”

“Mm…” Weismann’s mouth twisted up at the corner.  “Let’s just say Mikoto seems like the athletic type.”

Reishi’s breath caught in his chest, and as he coughed to loosen it, he couldn’t quite stop a surprised laugh, startled all over again by the candidness of this man seventy years out of his time.  His lips quirked into a wistful smile as he turned to the window, watching the distant ships listing like paper boats on an unsteady breeze.

“Well…” he murmured, and then paused, running his fingers back through his hair, “I regret I can’t confirm that from experience.”

“Not yet,” Shiro teased.  “Maybe that’s a topic you should take up with Mikoto—share a few fantasies.  I know _I_ would wake up for that.”

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Reishi asked drily, seeing him to the door.  He had more trouble dismissing the preoccupation those words had left burning in him like a coal, memories of daydreams he hadn’t revisited in a while.  Somehow they were just as vivid as he’d left them, like the feeling of an ocean tide on his skin long after he had left the waves.

As his Sword started to crack and the Blue aura began to bristle like a thunderstorm beneath his skin, Reishi had found his peace in small imaginings of a road not taken—a different end to that night when they’d walked side by side with the prickle of the rain on their faces, one in which he’d caught Mikoto’s arm before the phone rang, before he turned away, and dragged him back to his silent one-bedroom apartment where Reishi could strip him of his chains, learn the way that low voice rearranged the syllables of his name in the dark and press Mikoto down into the mattress until he was in flames, until Reishi was breathing for him every time their lips ignited.  Lying awake in the barracks, staring at the haze of the faraway ceiling, he’d imagined Mikoto’s head resting in his lap, the way brilliant red hair would feel between his fingers; that lazy smile teasing the curve of Mikoto’s lips as warm eyes closed not in pain or surrender but in contentment, the world at last at a distance that would let him rest.

He’d abandoned those thoughts when the Silver Sword came down and severed him from his Kingship, certain there would be no real peace for him for a very long time.

He wished he could go back and whisper in his own ear under the fireworks, under the rain, advice that wouldn’t have made any sense to him at the time: to abdicate with Mikoto, to take him away from the city and the ragged jaw of skyscrapers that had known the silhouettes of their Swords—maybe up the coast by train, past small towns with bright-painted houses, until they wore out the northern line…

Even in his head, they were wasted words.  Everything they’d had, they’d stolen in some way, and Reishi hadn’t realized what he was losing until it was far too late.

On the last day of the eleventh week, Reishi sat beside the chamber and laced his fingers through Mikoto’s unnaturally still ones, and allowed himself the close examination he’d never had the luxury of before: the callused skin pulled taut over joints and blunted knuckles, the patchwork of pale scars.  Reishi lifted their joined hands and pressed his lips to Mikoto’s knuckles one at a time.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, kissing the apology into the Red King’s skin.  “I was so blind to everything that mattered.  If I had another chance, I wouldn’t let you slip away from me.”

For a moment, the words hung weightless between them.  Then the house was pierced by the klaxon of rising alarms, the monitor system wailing as the wall of servers flickered and went dark.  Reishi wrenched his hand out of Mikoto’s.

“Mikoto—Mikoto!” he shouted, not sure what he was hoping for.

Status screens shuddered in the air above the chamber, frayed with static, every one at flatline—then they, too, were snuffed out, and everything stopped, everything but the frantic beating of his battered, bewildered heart.


	7. Precipice

The sun was nothing but a red line at the horizon by the time Shiro Weismann sighed and leaned back from the stasis chamber, deactivating the flutter of silver screens.  “Well, the system seems to have recovered,” he said, turning to look at Reishi where he sat in one of the white wicker chairs, bent forward over his steepled hands.  “No one really understands this system the way the Lieutenant did…I’m not sure what caused the glitch, but for the moment, it’s back to normal.”

Reishi didn’t say anything.  His fingers were wound so tight he could feel the bones disfiguring each other, his knuckles bloodless and raw.  He stared at the last remaining screen: the one tracking Mikoto’s vital measurements, the Red King safely locked away under the glass once more.

Shiro’s expression softened.  He laid a hand against the Blue King’s knee.  “He’s okay, Reishi.  Nothing’s changed.”

Reishi lowered his hands.  “And if the system hadn’t come back online?”

Shiro looked away.  Reishi couldn’t read his expression in profile, his lips pressed into a tight line as though holding all of his secrets in.  He glanced out the glass patio doors instead—at the lighted windows breaking against the shore like another sea, at the exsanguinated sky, the world growing a little darker with every tick of his clockwork heart.  The Silver King exhaled into the soft machine hum Reishi hadn’t noticed until it was gone.

“We both knew this wouldn’t last forever,” he said, and Reishi bent forward, tracing senseless patterns into his skin.

“How long?” he asked.

Weismann shook his head.  “Reishi.  I can’t know.”

Reishi closed his eyes.  “Please.  Shiro.  Give me something.”

Shiro didn’t reply for a long time, long enough that the silence became white noise in Reishi’s ears.  Then there was a sigh, the scuff of the Silver King shifting against the polished wood floor, the flicker of sensation as he squeezed Reishi’s knee and let him go.  “Maybe a week…maybe a lot less than that.  Either way, we’re running out of time.”

The way Shiro said _we’re running out of time_ made Reishi think they were long out of it.  He lifted his head, held those unreadable hazel eyes as the last of the red bled out of the horizon, nothing left now but a livid white scar.

“I’m going to lose him again, aren’t I?” he asked, and then wished he hadn’t.  He knew better than to ask questions he didn’t want answers to.

 

* * *

 

 

That night he dreamed of a world on fire, the streets of Shizume City howling with shouts and sirens.  Not a dream, after all, but a memory: the night he had found Mikoto on the roof of a skyscraper, languid and brutal, looking down on the city lights as if for the first time he were imagining putting them out.  The night after Totsuka’s death, when Reishi had come for him and seen the cracks threading through his already precarious Sword of Damocles, the riot of anguish in the red sky.

_You know what you’re risking, letting revenge consume you like this._   He had come to understand that the Red aura was like fire, fed by Mikoto’s rage; unchecked, it would grow until it sucked all the oxygen from the room.

Mikoto wasn’t listening.  Reishi grabbed him by the collar and slammed him back into the wall, and drove his fist into the concrete beside his head, shards of stone dusting the shoulders of their coats like early snow.  Mikoto just looked at him, unmoving, unimpressed, like everything in him had already given up.

_Damn it, Mikoto_. Reishi barely recognized his own voice, harsh like the December wind that cut him to the bone.

Mikoto raised his eyebrows.  _Hey, hey.  What happened to that famous composure?_

The fog of their breath made the air close.  Reishi leaned in to make it closer, stared into those blistering eyes from point-blank range.  _How am I supposed to be composed about this?_ he asked, and thought he caught a flicker of reaction in Mikoto’s face, something that wasn’t agony or relief but was somewhere in between, like the sweetness that followed the pain of worrying a bruise.  It was gone too quickly for him to put a name to it—and then so was Mikoto, slipping out of the cage of his arms as if he were insubstantial, already fading.  Reishi turned with him.

_I don’t want to see you go down this road_ , he said to Mikoto’s back.  But it was the Red King who answered, an inferno blazing against a city of white bonfires.

_Then look away._

It was the first time Reishi had lost control of himself since he became King.  Mikoto walked away and all the windows shattered in his wake—but it wasn’t Red aura shimmering in the glass.  It was Blue.


	8. Twelve

Twelve weeks, two days.  The world collapsed as it had when he’d first arrived, everything theoretical beyond the house’s four walls.  Reishi stopped going by the apartment or the new property that now seemed horribly premature.  He wondered if this was why Shiro had encouraged him to buy that house in the first place: so he’d have something to hang onto if this all fell apart.

It was hard to sleep with his glasses on, but the discomfort was easier to tolerate than the unsettling haze the status screens became without corrective lenses.  With unusually clear eyes, he stared up at the white ceiling through the trembling line of Mikoto’s heartbeat and tried to beat with him, to breathe when he breathed.  Reishi wasn’t sure if it was superstition, or if he was trying to cement the memory of this, the moth-soft flutter of Mikoto’s inhale, some part of the Red King still alive, holding on.

The darkness beneath his eyelids became the cold gray walls of the detention cell beneath Scepter 4, the Red King slumped into the corner of the stone bench, at ease in the chains they both knew could never hold him.  Reishi could still feel the numb ache of the wall under his fingers, the heat of Mikoto’s breath on his face as he tipped his head back, gave in again to Reishi collapsing the distance between them, the power play that meant nothing because he’d already laid down his king.

_There is one way you could keep me here_ , he murmured, looking up at Reishi with a little twist of a smile in the corner of his mouth.  _You could stay here with me, all the time.  Twenty-four hours a day inside this cell_.

Reishi pressed his lips together.  He wondered if Mikoto meant that at all, if in some small way he was begging to be saved from himself.  He couldn’t stop the question on his tongue.

_If I did that, would you abdicate?  Renounce the Red Kingship?_

Mikoto laughed, ducked his head over that small huff of sound.  _Can’t do that, any more than you can._ _Responsibilities, right?  That’s what you’re always busting my ass about._  

The words left his lips already hollow.  Reishi thought _hollow_ was the word for the man who’d said them, too, so still under the shackle of his arm he could have been cut from paper, lines of red and white ink bleeding into the low light.  Reishi pulled away from him feeling cold, so cold.

_Unfortunately, there are other things that require my attention._

The long exhale of a shallow breath, followed by the rustle of fabric and chain.  By the time he looked over his shoulder, Mikoto had turned away, and Reishi could read nothing but exhaustion in the line of his back, the slow rise and fall of his shoulders.

_That’s a shame,_ Mikoto told him, and in those three soft words Reishi felt him slipping away, events beyond his control ripping Mikoto from him with the force of a brutal tide.  His hand became a fist, clipped nails biting into his skin.

_Yes,_ Reishi agreed.  _It is._

 

* * *

 

 

Twelve weeks, four days.  The system shuddered and the alarms rang out again, though the chamber recovered faster this time, the startle of silver screens reappearing after only three seconds.  Reishi spent those three seconds staring into Mikoto’s closed eyes, wondering if there were only so many miracles even the Gold and Silver Kings could get away with.

 

* * *

 

 

Twelve weeks, six days.  In the early hours of the morning, Reishi walked down to the ocean and stood for a long time looking at the crash of the black waves, the endless expanse between himself and the horizon, some point he could never reach.  When he returned, he found the patio doors open and Weismann leaning back in one of the white wicker chairs, talking to Mikoto.

“Are you really done?” Shiro asked, staring down at the sleeping King—and though his voice was light, almost playful, his eyes seemed older than they ever had, dim and war-weary.  “The Lieutenant managed to get all sorts of things done—on his deathbed, even.  _And_ from beyond the grave.” Shiro rearranged the hands folded in his lap.  “Everyone at Homura says you were the type who never stopped until you got what you wanted.  Did you really get everything you wanted, Mikoto?”

Weismann turned as he said the last; Reishi felt the words like static on his skin, leaned into the doorframe as he held the Silver King’s gaze.  What he wanted was not in question, after all this time.  He was less certain what Mikoto had ultimately wanted from him.

As if it were the first week again, Reishi pulled his chair next to Weismann’s and dropped heavily into it, both of them bent in contemplation over the silent Red King.  Eventually Reishi cleared his throat.

“Why have you done all of this?” Shiro raised an eyebrow, and Reishi shook his head, gesturing to the chamber at their feet.  “You never knew Mikoto before this happened.  Why have you gone to such efforts to help bring him back?”

“Who says I’m not just doing it for you?” Shiro teased, and won a soft chuckle from him, Reishi smiling despite himself.  The Silver King sighed and leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees.  “No, the truth is, I…I have some things to make up for.”

“If you mean the Slates, you shouldn’t feel responsible for that,” Reishi said.  “We were Kings.  That was something we had a hand in…we were all drawn to that power for our own reasons.”

His own ambitions, Reishi had no illusions about.  Mikoto’s were more complicated—but even if he wasn’t sure what those ambitions had been, Reishi thought he understood where they came from: back alleys with scarred brick walls that left burns like rough kisses on pale knuckles, the soles of black sneakers scuffed on asphalt and chain-link, the kind of place where you could only keep what you fought for.  No one fought that hard and that often unless he was fighting something inside of himself, too.  Looking back, Reishi had the sense the Kingship was just another war Mikoto had gotten caught up in.

Weismann was shaking his head.  “It isn’t that.  I consider my debt paid as far as the Slates are concerned.  It’s the other part—the part I played in what happened on the island.” He smiled, mostly to himself.  “I think I might be the only one who ever understood the Red aura as well as Mikoto did.  There’s a rage to it, you know…a ferocity that makes it almost impossible to control.  And the more it rages, the stronger it becomes.” He sighed.  “Mikoto wanted revenge, and I needed an executioner for the Colorless King.  I thought it was the best possible solution, under the circumstances.”

“It was what he wanted,” Reishi murmured.  The same words Anna had said to him, tracing a small hand down the scabbard of his sword.

Shiro laughed under his breath.  “Yes.  But that doesn’t mean I should have given it to him. I was prepared to die, too, but…the way his death stayed with the Red clan, with you—that was the part I didn’t expect.  I never faced that kind of grief, you know.  I ran from it.”

Reishi turned to look at Shiro and saw the Silver King sitting in his place, this ageless, ephemeral being who had watched Dresden fall, who had looked down over the wreckage of his life and so many lives and fled before the fires went out.  Reishi didn’t envy him a century of scars.

He shifted in his chair.  “If we’re talking culpability…I’m as guilty are you are, if not more.” Reishi breathed in slowly, the air too heavy in his lungs.  “I think I was as close to him as anyone, except Totsuka, and I couldn’t…”

He wasn’t sure how to put the rest into words, but Shiro seemed to understand.  His head fell back along the crest of the chair as he fixed Reishi with a particular smile, one that was somehow sad and sympathetic at the same time.

“Mikoto has a part to play in this, too.  Don’t forget that.”

“What part is that?” Reishi asked.

Weismann turned that knowing smile on the Red King.  “He gave up,” he said simply.  “Giving up and running away…they have a lot to do with each other.  I think I understand Mikoto very well.” And then, as if he could sense Reishi surrendering in turn: “Don’t give up on him.  It isn’t over just yet.”

Reishi wondered if it would ever truly be over between him and Mikoto.

 

* * *

 

 

Twelve weeks, seven days, twenty minutes before midnight would change both of those measurements, Reishi stood on the patio with his elbows braced on the wrought-iron railing, looking out over the black sea while a lit cigarette withered in his fingers.  If he squinted, he could just make out the harbor on the other side of the inlet, tiny pinpricks of red and yellow light shivering on the faraway shore, beacons for boats still out there somewhere on the water.  Reishi lifted the cigarette to his lips and watched it breathe, charred paper crawling toward his skin.  The stars were so bright they looked like snow on its way down.

The thought made him smile a little, eyes soft with the memory of Mikoto ambling toward him up the dark temple steps, his hands shoved deep in his pockets—Mikoto leaning in to light his cigarette with a flick of his fingers, tossing a cheeky smile over his shoulder, playful in a way Reishi hadn’t seen him in a long time.  It reminded him of the strange magic of those nights at the ramen stand, the way Mikoto said his name when they were alone: lazy and irreverent, carelessly elated, as if it were a gift to be scuffed up and worn out until the sounds were familiar at every seam, a perfect fit for his tongue.  It reminded him of everything he was on the verge of losing, then and now.

Reishi chuckled, suffocating on the smoke of the Marlboro Red.  Then he flicked the cigarette away and watched it spin in the dark, one more tiny light going out.

Ashes and sparks.  Perhaps that was all they’d ever been.

That night, in the snow, Mikoto had let him talk himself out, but Reishi knew him too well to assume his silence meant he was listening.  In some ways it might have been easier to reach him if Mikoto had still been angry, ripped open and raw—but from the moment they locked eyes, Reishi knew that the fire was out in the Red King, and what he was trying to catch hold of was already smoke.

He said them anyway, all the words he knew Mikoto wouldn’t hear.

_This is unconscionable, even for you.  Your Weismann levels are at the brink.  You’re at your limit, Mikoto._

Mikoto took a drag, leaned back, closed his eyes like he was reveling in something, breathing in more than nicotine.  Reishi’s exhale came out hard.

_I’ll take your revenge for you_ , he vowed, the world so still even those soft words came back to him in echo. _I will kill the Colorless King in whatever manner you think justified.  Totsuka’s murder will not go unpunished._

He thought his immaculate sword could handle that, the burden of killing a King—and if not, he was prepared to abdicate, to step down and leave Scepter 4 in someone else’s hands.  He was willing to pay that price to appease him.  To prevent this.

Mikoto just laughed.  _Mm.  Pass.  I pay my own debts, thanks._   He looked down at the cigarette braced between his knuckles, twisted it a little to watch the flame flare.  _Totsuka always said this power was meant to protect the people I care about. But it didn’t do that._ Mikoto tipped his head back to stare up at the gray sky.  _Maybe it’s already done with me_.

Mikoto’s back slammed into the stone.  Reishi wrenched a fist into the collar of his shirt and pressed him down in the snow, outraged by the severity of what he was risking, what he almost seemed to be asking for.  He leaned in closer than he ever had, close enough to see the world reflected in Mikoto’s eyes, searching for some sign that he wasn’t the only one in agony over this.

_There are innocent students here._   _Your own clansmen.  Mine._ His voice was gravel, ground down like his patience.  _You understand that, don’t you?  You know what’s going to happen to them if you push this too far?_

All he saw in Mikoto’s eyes was whiteout.  The Red King turned his head, smiled as that infinitely small movement brushed their noses together.

_Thought that’s why you were here._

Reishi’s eyes widened.  Silently, mechanically, he pulled back and righted himself, the fingers of his hand numb as if he’d had to break them to let go.  Mikoto stayed where he was, watching him from his elbows, and Reishi looked away, closed his eyes as he fought to catch his breath. 

_So damn selfish,_ he whispered.  The air around them was ash, his lungs thick with smoke. _You’ve arranged it all so you get exactly what you want, haven’t you?  What about everyone you’re leaving behind?_

Mikoto rolled up to his knees, got to his feet dusting snow from his jeans. _I can’t just let it go.  The murder of my best friend._

_This isn’t what he’d want_ , Reishi said, and didn’t doubt for a moment that it was true.

Mikoto shrugged.  _Never said it was._

Though his cigarette was long out, Reishi could still taste it when he breathed in, something acrid that went sour on his tongue.  It was a taste he remembered all over again when he reached into his pocket in the days after Ashinaka Island and found the carton of Blue Sparks, haggard from the fray—just one more reason he’d thrown them out, switched to another poison.

Mikoto looked at him for a long time, standing there silent and slumped, eyes locked on Reishi as if he were taking in something Reishi hadn’t known he was giving.  Then he took a step forward, and another, perhaps the first time Mikoto had been the one to close the distance between them.

_You’ll stop me in time._ His voice was hushed, so low Reishi was sure he wasn’t hearing the words at all, just feeling their vibrations in his malleus, the small part of his inner ear that was throbbing like a hammer, like a heart. _You’re the only one I can trust that to, Reishi.  You won’t let that be the way I go out, right?_

 His trust was a cold, bitter thing.  Reishi set his jaw.  _I’ll do what I have to._

Mikoto huffed under his breath.  _Yeah.  I knew you would._

It was only when he reached the edge of the stairs that Mikoto stopped and looked back at him with the husk of his cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, burned all the way down to the filter.  _Did you really think you could change my mind?_ he asked, and Reishi sighed, pressed his own smoke-stained fingers to his lips.

_No,_ he admitted.  _I just…wanted to see a friend._

Mikoto’s eyes widened.  Then his expression went soft, and he ducked his head to hide a smile, carving his fingers back through the strands of that wild red hair.

_Hey.  Reishi._

_Yes?_ Reishi asked—unable, ever, to stop himself from answering that call.

Mikoto exhaled, closed his eyes.  Then he shook his head, burying his hands into the depths of his pockets.  _Nah.  Nothing.  I just wanted to say that name one more time._

_Mikoto_.

But Mikoto was already gone, slouching down the temple steps with his shoulders hunched under his heavy black coat, backlit by the snow.  Reishi watched him walk away consumed by the certainty that he had to stop this, to save him.  He could not let it end like this.


	9. Week Thirteen

_He felt the sword as if in his own flesh.  Usually the Blue aura cut effortlessly through anything, but with Mikoto it was like he felt every inch, every bone, and something in him ruptured too as Mikoto began to bleed._

_It was the first time he’d put his arms around Mikoto in this manner, though he was no longer sure why.  From the way he sank into Reishi, this was clearly what he’d needed all along._

_“Thanks, and sorry for making you do the dirty work…Reishi.”_

_He had those words caught in his ears, like the stutter of Mikoto trying to breathe, the sigh of his name on those bloodless lips.  It was a brittle and broken thing._

_“If you really felt that way, wasn’t there something you could have done…?”_

_That was what he whispered into Mikoto’s hair as he fell to his knees, and the Red King did too, the last embers of his aura burning out like stars.  Reishi closed his eyes, and then Mikoto’s, and stayed that way for a long time, until he could find it in himself to let him go._

_What he felt was hollow.  It was a hollowness he would feel all over again almost fourteen months later, when he saw that face again._

 

Reishi wasn’t sure what woke him: the dream or the sirens.  He jerked up from the cot, glasses askew, his ears ringing and the air above him rippling with the mad flicker of Mikoto’s vital signs.  He surged up from the sheets.  The alarm was a hurricane in his chest, snapping his ribs like withered trees.

The power dropped, stuttered, and Reishi lost his mind as the house went dark, the predawn light streaking the sky the only bright thing left in the entire world.  Then he slammed his hand down onto the glass and the screens flickered back to life, breaking over him like water as Reishi leaned into the chamber, staring at the precarious line of Mikoto’s pulse.  It was so faint he could barely distinguish it from the static.  Reishi raked his fingers through his hair.

That was his heart, struggling to beat under the glass.  That was his breath, trembling in fickle lungs.

He fumbled for his phone, but then stopped, his thumb hovering over the speed dial.  There was nothing the Silver King could do.  Nothing anyone could do anymore, except Mikoto.

“Mikoto…” Reishi pushed his glasses up and pressed his fingers over his eyes.  Then he reached out and disengaged the chamber’s lock, lifting the glass out of the way like an unfolding, iridescent wing.

Reishi slid his hand down the slope of Mikoto’s cheek and then deep into the tangle of that vibrant red hair, twining his fingers into the knot of soft strands.  Mikoto’s pulse throbbed against his skin, shallow and erratic.

“You can’t do this,” he said, and felt the words wrenched out of him, just as desperate and angry as he had been in the snow.  “I have waited so long for you.  There are no Swords, no Kings.  Those things that wore you down—they can’t touch you anymore.”

Static in the screens.  It wasn’t the power going out that was the glitch, Reishi realized; it was the power staying on, the fact that this heart was beating at all.  It was only a matter of time until the system corrected for that.  He slid his glasses off, leaned down until he could press their foreheads together, align the bridge of Mikoto’s nose with his.  His skin was so cold.  He breathed out and wished he could feel Mikoto breathing under him—all those ways they should have fit together before this moment, in a glass coffin in an empty house in a city of living ghosts, in the last seconds of something he could not bear to lose.  Reishi closed his eyes.

“I won’t ask anything of you,” he promised.  “I will keep those burdens away from you, as I should have done the first time.  I can finally give you all the things that I couldn’t.  Love you the way that I couldn’t.” The word left his throat raw.  He said it again all the same, tilted his head to burn his confession into the corner of the Red King’s mouth.  “I love you, Mikoto.  Please…don’t let it end like this.”

Silence.  He felt the heartbeat stutter against his fingers, barely a tremor on his skin.  Then there was something else—a soft hitch, like a breath caught.  A fragment of a moan.  Reishi pulled back far enough take in the blur of Mikoto’s face, the whole world hushed as Mikoto’s eyelashes trembled against his skin, and then, agonizingly, flickered open, embers blazing again in bleary amber eyes.

Reishi couldn’t breathe.  He fumbled for his glasses, nearly snapped the hinges in his urgency to get them back on.  Clear sight revealed Mikoto blinking up at him, his face twisted in confusion and pain.

“Reishi?” Mikoto rasped—and though his voice was hoarse, his name broken in the middle, it was still the most beautiful thing Reishi had ever heard.  His hand slid up to cradle Mikoto’s cheek.

“My god.  Mikoto.”

Mikoto lurched up out of the chamber, sucking in a gasp of air, shuddering in his bare skin.  Reishi caught him around the waist and pulled him into his shoulder, reveling in the feeling of Mikoto sinking into him—that unbearable distance collapsing into warmth and heartbeat, the collision of their bones, the relief rushing through him as Reishi held him closer, feeling suddenly, blissfully whole.

Mikoto’s breath was fast and shallow against his neck, his hands trembling in the folds of Reishi’s shirt.  “Where…what happened?  Where’s…”

“Calm down,” Reishi murmured, his eyes stinging with relief and gratitude.  “You’re all right.  You’ve been…asleep for a long time.”

Mikoto’s eyes were bewildered, all but blind.  His gaze darted between Reishi and the chamber and the house and settled finally on the porcelain cat beckoning under the window, the ceramic shimmering in the dawn, before he seemed to put any of the pieces together.  His fingers dug into the knots of Reishi’s spine.

“Get me out.”

The long blue coat was the first thing that came to hand.  Reishi wrapped it around Mikoto’s shoulders and then helped him out of the coffin, supporting his shaking legs long enough to reach the wall, which Mikoto slid gratefully down, still shivering, his hands clenched in Reishi’s sleeves.  His head lolled back against the wall, his unsteady breath grazing Reishi’s face.

“Ha…shit,” he hissed, exhausted, overwhelmed.  “You—I was…’m supposed to be…”

Reishi shook his head.  “Just breathe.  It is all long over.” Mikoto’s hair had fallen into his eyes, and Reishi couldn’t stop himself from reaching up to brush it away, chasing those vibrant strands back behind the shell of his ear.  “I will tell you everything, when you’re ready.”

Mikoto shifted against the wall, sinking into the warmth of the dark blue wool and watching him with half-lidded eyes.  “When’d you get so gentle?” he managed between breaths.

Reishi’s hand paused over his heart.  “I’ve always wanted to be gentle with you.”

Mikoto didn’t answer.  He watched Reishi with unreadable eyes, his chest heaving under the half-open coat, a pale strip of skin and old scars that Reishi worried would not hold him together.  Then Mikoto curled forward and dropped his head heavily onto Reishi’s shoulder, content to let someone else hold him up for a while.

It was more vulnerable than Reishi had ever seen him, as the Red King.  But he wasn’t a King anymore.  There were no Kings in this room.

Reishi slid a hand down Mikoto’s spine, soothing the tremors from his back, chasing away the shivers hiding in the soft hairs at the nape of his neck.  They’d stumbled through the unfinished puzzle, and the pieces lay in disorder all around them: twisted joints and half-broken cranes, the upsweep of rent white wings.  Mikoto pressed his face into Reishi’s collarbone and breathed and Reishi breathed with him, and watched the western sky burning in his periphery, a glimmer of scarlet caught in the corner of his eye.

For the first time in seventeen months, the sun rose on a world where Suoh Mikoto was alive.  Reishi had never seen it more beautiful.

The phone was still in Reishi’s pocket.  When Mikoto’s breathing had evened out, he retrieved it and balanced the thin black device in his palm, typing with his thumb because to do otherwise would require two hands and his left hand was exactly where it needed to be, cradling Mikoto’s head against his shoulder, holding him close.  He felt Mikoto shift, curious.

“I need to let Shiro…the Silver King know you’re awake,” he murmured.

“That guy survived, too?” Mikoto chuckled against Reishi’s neck.  “That’s really…good to hear.” Then he pushed himself slowly out of Reishi’s arms, back against the wall, one hand still anchored on Reishi’s shoulder.  “You stayed with me for a long time, huh?” Mikoto shook his head, his face troubled as if wrestling with a dream.  “I had this feeling like you were here, talking to me, but I can’t remember what you said…I miss anything?” he asked finally, his voice ragged as they locked eyes.

Reishi hesitated.  Then he smiled softly, pressed the backs of his knuckles to Mikoto’s cheek as he shook his head.

“Nothing I can’t say again.”


End file.
